Picasso's Quotes & Sayings

It's always necessary to seek for perfection. Obviously, for us, this word no longer has the same meaning. To me, it means: from one canvas to the next, always go further, further ... — Pablo Picasso

There's no denying that Caruso came with a voice?that Beethoven came with music in his soul, Picasso was drawing like an angel in the crib.You're born with it. — Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat. — Anna Quindlen

We mustn't be afraid of inventing anything ... Everething there is in us exists in nature. After all, we're part of nature. If it resembles nature, that's fine. If it doesn't, what of it? When man wanted to invent something as useful as the human foot, he invented the wheel, which he used to transport himself and his burdens. The fact that the wheel doesn't have the slightest resemblance to the human foot is hardly a criticism of it. — Francoise Gilot

Pablo Picasso was notorious for sucking the energy out of the people he met. His granddaughter Marina claimed that he squeezed people like one of his tubes of oil paints. You's have a great time hanging out all day with Picasso, and then you's go home nervous and exhausted, and Picasso would go back to his studio and paint all night, using the energy he'd sucked out of you. — Austin Kleon

Imitators? All right! Disciples if you like. But disciples be damned. It's not interesting. — Pablo Picasso

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people. — David Chase

It's a poor artist who borrows
a good artist steals. — Pablo Picasso

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen. — Pablo Picasso

You see these thick curtains shut out the daylight: artificial light suits me a great deal better; it's absolutely steady, and much more exciting. — Pablo Picasso

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

Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don't quite know where it comes from. — 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

Braque always said that the only thing that counts, in painting, is the intention, and it's true. What counts is what one wants to do, and not what one does. That's what's important. — Pablo Picasso

What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What's wrong with that? On the contrary, it's a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch ... And it's at the very moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself. — Pablo Picasso

When I think of competition it's like I try to create against the past. I think about Michelangelo and Picasso, you know, the pyramids. — Kanye West

Why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way ... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. — Pablo Picasso

Almost every evening, either I went to [Georges] Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other's work. A canvas wasn't finished unless both of us felt it was. — Pablo Picasso

We are all familiar with the dove carrying an olive branch as a peace offering. The jewelry I've created pays tribute both to the messenger's noble mission and gardens as a refuge of peace and tranquility. — Paloma Picasso

Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one's whole lifetime. — Pablo Picasso

What is a face really? It's own photo? It's makeup? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist. — Pablo Picasso

Picasso said he'd paint with his own wet tongue
on the dusty floor of a jail cell if he had to.
We have to create.
It is the only thing louder than destruction.
It's the only chance the bard are gonna break,
our hands full of color
reaching towards the sky,
a brush stroke in the dark.
It is not too late.
That starry night
is not yet dry. — Andrea Gibson

Let's look at people as artists and try to support them; just because Picasso painted a couple of bad paintings, that's no reason to say he's a lousy painter. — Steve Guttenberg

To judge God solely by the present world would be a tragic mistake. At one time, it may have been "the best of all possible worlds," but surely it is not now. The Bible communicates no message with more certainty than God's displeasure with the state of creation and the state of humanity. Imagine this scenario: vandals break into a museum displaying works from Picasso's Blue Period. Motivated by sheer destructiveness, they splash red paint all over the paintings and slash them with knives. It would be the height of unfairness to display these works - a mere sampling of Picasso's creative genius, and spoiled at that - as representative of the artist. The same applies to God's creation. God has already hung a "Condemned" sign above the earth, and has promised judgment and restoration. That this world spoiled by evil and suffering still exists at all is an example of God's mercy, not his cruelty. — Philip Yancey

If you look at true artists, if they get really good at something, it occurs to them that they can do this for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful at it to the outside world, but not really successful to themselves. That's the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure they're still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure. — Brent Schlender

Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value. — Jerry Saltz

I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso. — Rita Rudner

It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso — Patsy Asuncion

They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist's life, the more he can draw on for his art. Van Gogh and Picasso had troubled souls, but poor Steve Kaufman has been shot once, stabbed 3 times - all by women. That is a lot of drama for great art. — Robin Leach

Turns out Picasso's passion for uncertainty, mystery, and the thrill of life never ended. — Jerry Saltz

I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same. — Georges Braque

Painting it's a blind man profession. Painter is painting not what he sees but what he feels. — Pablo Picasso

I don't own any of my own paintings because a Picasso original costs several thousand dollars and that's a luxury I cannot afford. — Pablo Picasso

I've always been fascinated by Picasso and how he would look at a single image through multiple perspectives and from separate moments in time. He would look at a woman's face and he would see almost a three-dimensional look even though it was a flat canvas. I thought, well why couldn't we do the same thing with a football play? — Steve Sabol

There's no concession to the fact that Dylan might be a more sophisticated singer than Whitney Houston, that he's probably the most sophisticated singer we've had in a generation. Nobody is identifying our popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan's a Picasso - that exuberance, range, and assimilation of the whole history of music. — Leonard Cohen

Fifth letter : To lead your best life, do your best work

There is no insignificant work in the world. All labor is a chance to express personal talents, to create our art and to realize the genius we are built to be. We must work like picasso painted : with devotion, passion, energy and excellence. In this way, our productivity will not only become a source of inspiration to others, but it will have an impact - making a difference in the lives around us. One of the greatest secrets to a life beautifully lived is to do work that matters. And to ascend to such a state of mastery in it that people can't take ther eyes off you. — Robin S. Sharma

I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments. — Ellsworth Kelly

Vladimir Putin bribed a soccer official with a Picasso painting so he would support Russia's bid to host the 2018 World Cup. Putin was like, 'It wasn't Picasso, just picture of what his face would look like if he said no.' (Nose over here, eye up here, ear in forehead.) — Jimmy Fallon

When the painting is hanging on your wall for a long time, you don't notice it. You get tired of it, even if it's a Picasso. When the next generation inherits the painting, they sell it. I don't want to be sold. — Julio Iglesias

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint. — Pablo Picasso

Think about it: you've already related it down to something that somebody else can understand. If art relates to something - it's like Picasso, it's like Mondrian - it's not. Art's supposed to be what it is. Using a reference of art history might help for some kind of sales, but it doesn't really help anybody. Art is what it is; it cannot be footnoted, until it enters the world. Then it has a history. Then the footnotes are the history, not the explanation. — Lawrence Weiner

This is a great turtle, Katie." "James." Millie brings the waffles to the table. "Are you blind?" Yeah, you tell him, Millie. Some people just can't appreciate good art. Millie holds her folded napkin up proudly. "It's a frog." True artists (like Picasso or me) are always misunderstood. — Jenny B. Jones

Sometimes people claim they don't need a crutch like Jesus, but he's not a crutch, he's a teacher. If you want to be a writer, you read the classics. If you want to make great music you listen to music that's been made by great musicians who have gone before. If you're studying to be a painter, it's a good idea to study the great masters. If Picasso came into your room while you were learning to draw and said 'Hi, I have a couple of hours would you like some hints?' would you say no? So it is with spiritual masters: Jesus, Buddha or any other enlightened being. They're geniuses in the way they used their minds and hearts just as Beethoven was a genius with music, or Shakespeare a genius with words. Why not learn from them, follow their lead, study what they were doing right. — Marianne Williamson

I think, aesthetically, car design is so interesting - the dashboards, the steering wheels, and the beauty of the mechanics. I don't know how any of it works, I don't want to know, but it's inspirational. — Paloma Picasso

We find a giant like Picasso shifting in his own lifetime from style to style, partly as a reflection of the shifting character of the last four decades in Western society, and partly like a man dialing a ship's radio on the ocean, trying vainly to find the wave length on which he can talk to his fellow men. But the artists, and the rest of us too, remain spiritually isolated and at sea, and so we cover up our loneliness by chattering with other people about the things we do have language for - the world series, business affairs, the latest news reports. Our deeper emotional experiences are pushed further away, and we tend, thus, to become emptier and lonelier. — Rollo May

I think my most famous was 'Poco's Legend.' It's a white album with a simple line drawing of a horse. It almost has a Picasso feel to it. I remember that Rusty Young, the lead singer of the band, said, 'I want you to draw a horse for the song 'Legend,' which is about a phantom spirit horse. I want you to do it in several lines.' — Phil Hartman

If Melissa Miller were an artist, she would have painted the world in vicious streaks of red. Nothing like Picasso's rose period, all soft and cheerful and so optimistic that it made you want to puke. Missy's red phase would have been brutal and bright enough to cut your eyes. Missy's art would have been honest. — Jackie Kessler

The rear door was black, the driver's side door was red, and the hood was sunshine-yellow. If Henry Ford and Picasso had gone out on a bender, that car was what the hangover would have looked like. — Kathleen O'Reilly

Part of the problem [with Picasso's fame] lies with the artist himself - at that point when Picasso stopped making art and began making Picassos...it is a potentially fatal side-effect of success for any artist... Would it be a parody of modernism's self-referentiality to describe this point as one where the artist stops thinking like an artist and starts [painting] like an art historian? — John Jacobus

I threw [Picasso's] drawing on the floor and in doing so, threw away about £50m. — Brian Blessed

what goes on in that woman's head but she says she isn't psychic, that this has never happened to her before. I don't know what to believe, Jane, but I do think she is a seriously weird woman. You heard her screams at the station, didn't you?' Jane nodded. 'Well, Tom and I stayed the night at her place last night and it was exactly the same. She shrieks in her sleep. Whatever she is dreaming about, it's not pretty. She says she has them every night until Picasso kills the girl. Well, — Valerie Keogh

I didn't understand art, until one day Tom Brady took me to the museum, and we looked at the Picasso, and he said, 'Rob, that's a touchdown.' We looked at the Rembrandt and Tom said, 'Rob, that's another touchdown.' We looked at the Vermeer and Tom said, 'Rob, that's another touchdown.' And I said, 'No, Tom, that's just a field goal.' — Rob Gronkowski

It never ceases to amaze me how prosaic, pedestrian, unimaginative people can persistently pontificate about classical grammatical structure as though it's fucking rocket science. These must be the same people who hate Picasso, because he couldn't keep the paint inside the lines and the colors never matched the numbers. — Abbe Diaz

If I could have any artist's work on my sitting room wall it would probably be by Van Gogh or Picasso. — Juliet Stevenson

There's no such thing as a bad Picasso, but some are less good than others. — Pablo Picasso

An artist must forget painting when he paints. That's the only way he will do original work. — Pablo Picasso

I feel a lot of cities are like, you go and you are trying to do your art, and there are so many other artists there who are so brilliant. And it's kind of like they stomp on the scene, and they are like, "You're not already Picasso? Get the hell out of here!" And Memphis is like, "Well, you'll get there one day!" — Valerie June

Picasso's superhuman gift for draftsmanship might have made him lazy about pursuing the full potential of color. It was not unusual for him to build a composition by first outlining figures and objects in black and then filling the interstices in a perfunctory manner that can put one in mind of a museum-shop coloring book. — Martin Filler

[Pablo] Picasso really changed my life. It's strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known. — Agnes Varda

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

Overcooked, flabby pasta or a blob of tomato ketchup was enough to incense Frank; a plate of soggy pasta in Matteo's Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, owned by his childhood buddy, Matty Jordan, had Frank storming into the kitchens. He looked around wildly, "Where are all the Italians?" he roared at the startled Filipino kitchen staff. Not content, he shot back upstairs and threw his plate of pasta against the wall. As he walked out, he dipped his finger in the tomato sauce and signed the smear: Picasso (Matty very good-naturedly put a frame around this later). — Fiona Ross

Art is about imagination. When you look at a picture from Salvador Dali, that's about imagination. When you look at Picasso, that's about imagination. Doing stuff from your heart. — LL Cool J

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt. — Pablo Picasso

No one is indispensable to anyone else. You imagine you're necessary to him or that he will be very unhappy if you leave him, but I'm sure that if you do, within three months he will have fitted another face into your role and you'll see that no one is suffering because of your absence. You must feel free to do whatever feels best to you. Being someone's nurse is no way to live unless you're unable to do anything else. You have to say something on your own and you ought to be thinking, first and foremost, about that. — Francoise Gilot

I think Julianne Moore is very, very good. I've worked with her. We did Surviving Picasso. I remember one scene we did together. She had to have a nervous, a mental, breakdown in this one scene.I didn't have many lines. I just had to make sure I knew I came in on cue all right. And I was just watching her walking though the rehearsal. I thought I know what she's doing, "This is going to be terrific." So they said, "Are you ready" and she said, "Yeah," "Ok, roll the camera." And all in one take. — Anthony Hopkins

We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it's all gone. — Pablo Picasso

Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence. — Roy Lichtenstein

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

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

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

If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes. — Barack Obama

Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create. — Pablo Picasso

EVERYTHING IS A MIRACLE. IT IS A MIRACLE THAT ONE DOES NOT MELT IN ONE'S BATH. - PICASSO — Laini Taylor

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. — Pablo Picasso

There's the artist's intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn]. Picasso drawings are like that ... the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh. — John Berger

One of the things I find most mysterious in Picasso's work is what I would call the 'unlocation of place. — Leo Steinberg

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

Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.
(about Guernica). — Pablo Picasso

Look at the paintings of Picasso. He is a great painter, but just a subjective artist. Looking at his paintings, you will start feeling sick, dizzy, something going berserk in your mind. You cannot go on looking at Picasso's painting long enough. You would like to get away, because the painting has not come from a silent being. It has come from a chaos. It is a by product of a nightmare. But ninety-nine percent art belongs to that category. — Rajneesh

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us. — Pablo Picasso

Having studied art history, as opposed to political history, I tend to incorporate found objects into my books. Just as Pablo Picasso glued a fragment of furniture onto the canvas of Still Life with Chair Caning, I like to use whatever's lying around to paint pictures of the past--traditional pigment like archival documents but also the added texture of whatever bits and bobs I learn from looking out bus windows or chatting up people I bump into on the road. — Sarah Vowell

I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate. — Pablo Picasso

I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them. — Pablo Picasso

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning. — Pablo Picasso

Fortunately I had a great intern who did a lot of the research on Andy's prices, which of course are phenomenal, but getting them straight - you know, he's reached this $100million plateau that only a handful of other artists have reached, which puts him in the company of Cezanne, Klimt, Picasso, and such. — Bob Colacello

I scurry out to the three-way mirror. With an extra-large sweatshirt over the top, you can hardly tell that they are Effert's jeans. Still no Mom. I adjust the mirror so I can see reflections of reflections, miles and miles of me and my new jeans. I hook my hair behind my ears. I should have washed it. My face is dirty. I lean into the mirror. Eyes after eyes after eyes stare back at me. Am I in there somewhere? A thousand eyes blink. No makeup. Dark circles. I pull the side flaps of the mirror in closer, folding myself into the looking glass and blocking out the rest of the store. My face becomes a Picasso sketch, my body slicing into dissecting cubes. I saw a movie once where a woman was burned over eighty percent of her body and they had to wash all the dead skin off. They wrapped her in bandages, kept her drugged, and waited for skin grafts. They actually sewed her into a new skin. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Maybe I don't have the same sense of humor. Maybe people aren't comfortable gauging a painting that way. They think that if it's a painting then it must be serious. I think Picasso can be hilarious, to name one example. — Joe Bradley

I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown. — Sarah Hall

Now I contradict myself. Picasso he do too. He say pull out your brain, yes, he also say, 'Painting is a blind man's profession' and 'To draw you must close your eyes and sing'. And Michelangelo, he say he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything is true at once. Life is contradiction, we take in every lesson we find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw. — Jandy Nelson

This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax. — Pablo Picasso