Starting to paint, I felt gloriously free, quiet, and alone.

When I started to paint I felt transported into a kind of paradise... In everyday life I was usually bored and vexed... Starting to…

— Henri Matisse

“Once it's all done, I fancy I'll come back as an owl. Free and alone in the quiet of the night.”

— David Kirk

I regret not starting to paint earlier...It is one of the few things I do regret.

— Francis Bacon

When I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it…

— Henri Matisse

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

— Henri Matisse

When I look at nature I feel as if I'll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might…

— Claude Monet

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years. May you wake up... and start dancing while…

— Rob Brezsny

“I wasn’t a nerd, mind you, but I’d spent a lot of my youth studying Epics, so I’d had limited experience with social interaction.…

— Brandon Sanderson

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since…

— Georgia O'Keeffe

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves…

— Edvard Munch

It's all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint - essence.

— Emily Carr

Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.

— John Greenleaf Whittier

You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the…

— Maya Angelou

I paint the way I spread butter on pumpernickel.

— Josef Albers

To explicate the uses of the Brain seems as difficult a task as to paint the Soul, of which it is commonly said, that…

— Thomas Willis