Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.

Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.

The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.

From a purely ethnological point of view, I was not a period-born Dada.

Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.

When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.

I never finished the 'Large Glass' because, after working on it for eight years, I probably got interested in something else; also, I was tired. It may be that, subconsciously, I never intended to finish it because the word 'finish' implies an acceptance of traditional methods and all the paraphernalia that accompany them.

Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art.

Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the 'objet trouve' because the so-called 'found object' is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique.

It is curious to note how fragile the memory is, even for the important times in one's life. This is, moreover, what explains the fortunate fantasy of history.

Destruction is also creation.

I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.

I would have to think about it for two or three months before I decided to do something which would have meaning. And it would have to be more than just an impression or pleasure. I would need an objective, a meaning. That is the only thing that could help me.

In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero.

Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say.

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.

I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.

In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn.

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about.

Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.

I wanted to use my possibility to be an individual, and I suppose I have, no?

If a shadow is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four-dimensional Universe.

Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?

I am afraid to end up being in need to sell canvases - in other words, to be a society painter.

You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.

When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much.

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.

The most interesting thing about artists is how they live

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.