• Painting has nothing to do with illustration, it is in away its opposite...In a way it's purely by chance that something happens on the canvas...but while I'm painting, suddenly, out of the painting itself, in some way these forms and directions that I hadn't anticipated just appear. It is these that I call accidents...Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• Photography, for me, brings us back to the actual event more clearly, more directly. Contemplation allows me to imagine my own truth, and the idea that I get of this truth helps me to discover other ideas, and so on…My work becomes a chain of ideas created by the many images that I look at and which I have registered, often on contrasting subjects.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• The life I've lived happen to be more profoundly curious than my work. Then sometimes, when I think about it, I'd prefer everything about my life to blow up after I die and disappear.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• Those who work in a preconceived style, deliberately turning their backs on nature, miss the truth. An artist must recognize, when he is reasoning, that his picture is an artifice; but when he is painting, he should feel that he has copied nature. And even when he departs from nature, he must do it with the conviction that it is only to interpret her more fully.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
• I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
• I'd like to introduce my color prints under the most favorable of conditions. For this reason I must separate them by intervals of a different character. I decided that handwriting was best suited for this purpose.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
• I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
• My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.
  Jackson Pollock Quotes
• Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment but it was. It was a fine Compliment.
  Jackson Pollock Quotes
• There’s nothing worse than a sharp picture of a fuzzy concept.
  Mark Rothko Quotes
• The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.
  Mark Rothko Quotes
• When I started out, art was doing down the drain. The people who used to magazine illustrations and the covers were being replaced by photographers. And when they started using photographers, I started to show my work with galleries. Everybody also was doing window decoration. That led into more galleries. I had some paintings in a window, then in a gallery.
  Andy Warhol Quotes