“Being a painter, I ought to say why in pictures people's faces are painted green and red.”

“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.”

“What good is it being a painter if you can't paint yourself?”

“Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.”

“Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.”

“In the great green room, there was a telephoneAnd a red balloonAnd a picture of a cat jumping over the moon...”