“To paint is to make use of a special sense, an innate sense, in order to give shape to a beautiful piece of matter. One proceeds like nature to create diamonds, gold, sapphire, agate, precious metal, silk, flesh. It is a gift of delightful sensuality which enables one, with a small amount of the simplest liquid pigment, to reconstruct or amplify life and impress it upon a surface from which will emerge a human presence, the supreme irradiation of the mind. It is a gift of native, inborn sensuality. It cannot be acquired.”
A soi-meme, Paris, 1922.