If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.
PABLO PICASSO, quoted in Gertrude Stein's Picasso
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.
PABLO PICASSO, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
Art is never chaste. We forbid it to the ignorant innocents, never allow a contact with it to those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. And, if it's chaste it isn't art.
PABLO PICASSO, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty.
PABLO PICASSO, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
PABLO PICASSO, attributed, Cubism: a history and an analysis
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.
PABLO PICASSO, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
PABLO PICASSO, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
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.
PABLO PICASSO, attributed, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
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, attributed, A Year of Painting: Exercises for Expressive Painting
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
PABLO PICASSO, attributed, Managing Creativity
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
PABLO PICASSO, attributed, Artist to Artist: Inspiration & Advice from Artists Past & Present
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
PABLO PICASSO, Orange Coast Magazine, May 1986
It takes a very long time to become young.
PABLO PICASSO, Saturday Review, 1959
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.
PABLO PICASSO, "The Arts: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine Covering All Phases of Ancient and Modern Art", 1923
