Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

You mustn't expect me to repeat myself. My past doesn't interest me. I would rather copy others than copy myself. In that way I should at least be giving them something new. I love discovering things.

You can't escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you're always in it.

What the artist gains in the way of liberty he loses in the way of order.

What I achieve the first day can be perfectly valid, but it is not satisfying. If I can go that far spontaneously, then I must shed that result as an old skin and inquire further into the unknown, or at least the not-yet-known-to-myself.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.

Today, as you know, I am famous and very rich. But when I am alone with myself, I haven't the 'courage' to consider myself an artist, in the great and ancient sense of that word... I am only a public entertainer, who understands his age.

Today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

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

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. There's no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark.

The academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so may lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive independently of that canon.

The 'refined', the 'rich', the 'professional do nothing', the 'distiller of quintessence' desire only the peculiar, and sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. And I myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my head. The less they understood, the more they have admired me!

Reality is to be found in lightness and darkness.

People don't realize what they have when they own a picture by me. Each picture is a phial with my blood. That is what has gone into it.

Paradise is to love many things with a passion.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

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.

My whole life has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against Reaction and the death of art.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

I'm a joker who has understood his epoch and has extracted all he possibly could from the stupidity, greed and vanity of his contemporaries.

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.

I don't say everything, but I paint everything.

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.