Pablo Picasso Quotes

Everything you can imagine is real.

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.

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.

To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can’t explain them.

You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.

Work is a necessity for man. A horse does not go between the shafts of its own accord. Man invented the alarm clock.

When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.[Cuando era niño, mi madre me dijo: ‘Si te conviertes en soldado, serás general. Si te conviertes en monje, terminarás siendo el Papa.’ En cambio, me convertí en pintor y terminé como 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.

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? 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.

We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.

To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.