Quotes & Sayings About Picasso

When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. — Pablo Picasso

A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you. — James M. Cain

A triangle with four points is what Euclid rides into hell. — Steve Martin

Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things? — Pablo Picasso

Peter took a deep breath. 'Really, Mother! Anyone who blows pink bubble in front of a Picasso Blue painting should be arrested. — E.L. Konigsburg

Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves. — Dag Hammarskjold

I put in my pictures everything I like. So much the worse for the things - they have to get along with one another. — Pablo Picasso

There is a constant ebb and flow in art historical reputations. The reputation of even the greatest figures like Picasso are in flux. — Jeffrey Deitch

If Picasso drips, I drip ... For a long while I was with Cezanne, and now I am with Picasso. — Arshile Gorky

It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own. — Pablo Picasso

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things. — Pablo Picasso

I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else. — Pablo Picasso

The constitution of our country says that all men are created equal, but it's a lie. I'll never be able to make a jump shot like Magic Johnson, or drive a car like Mario Andretti, or paint like Picasso. We are not created equal in talent. But the place where we are least equal is the heart. You can work at a talent, take lessons, but love, love either works or it doesn't. You love someone or you don't. You can't change it. You can't undo it. - A Lick of Frost — Laurell K. Hamilton

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance. — Pablo Picasso

If you want art, don't mess about with movies. Buy a Picasso. — Michael Winner

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. — Pablo Picasso

Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill. — David Hockney

To model an object is to possess it. — Pablo Picasso

When you're really young, you're young for life. — Pablo Picasso

I paint what I think, not what I see. — Pablo Picasso

If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse ... but surely you will see the wildness! — Pablo Picasso

When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays ... — Pablo Picasso

The more famous you become, the less people will tell you your faults. — Paloma Picasso

Pablo Picasso would paint a painting and hang it on the wall, and you would go and see the painting exactly how he wanted it to be made. But if you have an idea for a TV show, for example, you're beholden to studios to produce it and distributors to distribute it. — Casey Neistat

I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow. — Georges Braque

I've always been proud that my name stands for peace. — Paloma Picasso

Most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mindmatter question; they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces. This rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art. — Jewel Spears Brooker

I'm a Picasso, not a Vermeer — David Arnold

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things. — Pablo Picasso

I really think that if I had met Picasso during peacetime, nothing would have happened. — Francoise Gilot

Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty. — Pablo Picasso

The peasant finds no "natural" urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort — Clement Greenberg

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly. — Pablo Picasso

Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I'd be rid of them. They wouldn't be around to complicate my existence. Maybe, that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents. — Pablo Picasso

Given the choice between four perfectly acceptable movies, they invariably opt for a walk through the Picasso museum or a tour of the cathedral, saying, "I didn't come all the way to Paris so I can sit in the dark." They make it sound so bad. "Yes," I say, "but this is the French dark. It's ... darker than the dark we have back home. — David Sedaris

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow. — Anselm Kiefer

People who read are people who dream. — Pablo Picasso

Art is a lie that reveals the truth. — Pablo Picasso

Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock. — Pablo Picasso

He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law. — Pablo Picasso

This resembles the slow discipline of art: it's the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize. — Robert Bly

The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain. — Georges Braque

I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there. — Paloma Picasso

For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography — Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. — Jonathan Richman

Fallujah was a Guernica with no Picasso. A city of 300,000 was deprived of water, electricity, and food, emptied of most of its inhabitants who ended up parked in camps. Then came the methodical bombing and recapture of the city block by block. When soldiers occupied the hospital, The New York Times managed to justify this act on grounds that the hospital served as an enemy propaganda center by exaggerating the number of casualties. And by the way, just how many casualties were there? Nobody knows, there is no body count for Iraqis. When estimates are published, even by reputable scientific reviews, they are denounced as exaggerated. Finally, the inhabitants were allowed to return to their devastated city, by way of military checkpoints, and start to sift through the rubble, under the watchful eye of soldiers and biometric controls. — Jean Bricmont

I don't believe in the clash of cultures. The culture is one. The culture is a ring off the same chain. Picasso was very much influenced by the African arts, and he influenced a whole other generation of artists. So everything influences everything. — Marjane Satrapi

Everything exists in limited quantity - especially happiness. — Pablo Picasso

Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who's got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It's a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso's a Picasso. — Peter Orner

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. — Pablo Picasso

While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas. — Pablo Picasso

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely. — Pablo Picasso

A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives a life like a living creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from day to day. This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man who is looking at it. — Pablo Picasso

The earth doesn't have a housekeeper to do the dusting. — Pablo Picasso

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. — Steve Jobs

Style is besides the point. Nobody would pay attention if one always said the same thing, in the same words and the same tone of voice. — Pablo Picasso

There ought to be an absolute dictatorship ... a dictatorship of painters ... a dictatorship of one painter ... to suppress all those who have betrayed us ... — Pablo Picasso

Most people don't do something seminal. I've done it twice: with my tent and my bed. Picasso did it with Cubism. — Tracey Emin

In art, practice always comes before theory. — Pablo Picasso

One cannot be a sorcerer all the time. How could one live? — Pablo Picasso

Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman. — Pablo Picasso

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought — Pablo Picasso

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility. — Pablo Picasso

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art. — Jerry Saltz

I remember one day when Juan Gris told me about a bunch of grapes he had seen in a painting by Picasso. The next day these grapes appeared in a painting by Gris, this time in a bowl; and the day after, the bowl appeared in a painting by Picasso. — Jacques Lipchitz

Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time. — Pablo Picasso

The reason for which Picasso was compelled to resort to signs and allegories should now be clear enough: his utter political helplessness in the face of a historical situation which he set out to record; his titanic effort to confront a particular historical event with an allegedly eternal truth; his desire to give hope and comfort and to provide a happy ending, to compensate for the terror, the destruction, and inhumanity of the event. Picasso did not see what Goya had already seen, namely, that the course of history can be changed only by historical means and only if men shape their own history instead of acting as the automaton of an earthly power or an allegedly eternal idea. — Max Raphael

[Picasso] loved ... women for the sexual, carnivorous impulses they aroused in him. Mixing blood and sperm, he exalted women in his paintings, imposed his violence on them, and sentenced them to death once he felt their mystery had been discharged and the sexual power they instilled in him had dulled ... Women were his prey. He was the Minotaur. These were bloody, indecent bullfights from which he always emerged the dazzling victor. — Marina Picasso

Every positive value has its price in negative terms ... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima. — Pablo Picasso

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. — Pablo Picasso

Even if the painting is green, well then! The 'subject' is the green. There is always a subject; it's a joke to suppress the subject, it's impossible. — Pablo Picasso

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean. — Pablo Picasso

Love is the greatest refreshment in life — Pablo Picasso

The first exhibition [Publo Picasso] was organized by the communist party - because of his position during the war and all that. — Agnes Varda

Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct. They became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours. Don't misunderstand me: shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their existence. — Pablo Picasso

The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him. — Pablo Picasso

I don't have anything to prove anymore. I can relax. — Paloma Picasso

What I have to do is utilize as best I can the ideas which objects suggest to me, connect, fuse, and color in my way the shadows they cast within me, illumine them from the inside. And since of necessity my vision is quite different from that of the next man, my painting will interpret things in an entirely different manner even though it makes use of the same elements. — Pablo Picasso

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero. — Pablo Picasso

I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London. — Marianne Faithfull

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint. — Pablo Picasso

I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls. — Siri Hustvedt

Often while reading a book one feels that the author wouold heave preferred to paint rather than to wirte; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors. — Pablo Picasso

Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were the great painters. I am only a public clown. — Pablo Picasso

Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them! — Pablo Picasso

In the Chauvet Cave, there is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. Why does Pablo Picasso, who had no knowledge of the Chauvet Cave, use exactly the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman? Very, very strange. — Werner Herzog

I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What's the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it. — Pablo Picasso

Picasso's mother told him if he got into the army, he'd be a general. If he became a monk, he'd be the pope. Instead he was a painter and became Picasso. — Katy Evans

I never met Publo Picasso. I took pictures at the Festival d'Avignon, but I was too shy to ask to go in his studio. It does not look like me now, but I was very shy, and shy of men also. I think there was a world that frightened me totally. — Agnes Varda

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur. — Kenneth Koch

Let's say that you could carry around a perfect copy of a three-dimensional realization of a Caravaggio painting (or if your tastes are more modern make it a Picasso). You would carry a small box in your pocket, and whenever you wanted, you could press a button and the box would open up into life-sized glory and show you the picture. You would bring it to all the parties you attended. The peak of the culture of the seventeenth century (or say the 1920s if you prefer Picasso) would be at your disposal. Alternatively, let's say you could carry around in your pocket an iPhone. That gives you thousands of songs, a cell phone, access to personal photographs, YouTube, email, and web access, among many other services, not to mention all the applications that have not yet been written. You will have a strong connection to the contemporary culture of small bits. — Tyler Cowen

I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting. — Pablo Picasso

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. — Pablo Picasso

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me. — Elton John

Whether he wants it or not, man is the instrument of nature; she imposes on him character and appearance. — Pablo Picasso

I have never had time for the idea of searching. Whenever I wanted to express something, I did so without thinking of the past or the future. — Pablo Picasso

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not. — Pablo Picasso

I decided to do everything around fashion but fashion itself, and that's accessories. — Paloma Picasso

Nobody taught Picasso how to paint - he learned for himself. And nobody can teach you to be a producer. You can learn the mechanics, but you can't learn what's right about a script or a director or an actor. That comes from instinct and intuition. It comes from inside you. — Dino De Laurentiis

A painting is not thought out in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it's finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it — Pablo Picasso