Good painting is like good cooking it can be tasted, but not explained.

I was a barbarian, tender and full of violence. I translated by instinct, without any method, not merely an artistic truth but above all a human one.

What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb which would have led to the scaffold I tried to achieve in painting by using color of maximum purity. In this way I satisfied my urge to destroy old conventions, to disobey in order to re-create a tangible, living, and liberated world.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription one must be sick to believe them.

I knew neither jealousy nor hate but was possessed by a rage to recreate a new world, the world which my eyes perceived, a world all to myself. I was poor but I knew that life is beautiful.

I wanted to revolutionise habits and contemporary life - to liberate nature, to free it from the authority of old theories and classicism... I felt a tremendous urge to re-create a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely mine.

I seem initially to have followed Fauvism, and then to have followed in Cézanne's footsteps. Whatever - I do not mind... as long as first of all I remained Vlaminck.