Edvard Munch

“Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.”

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

“A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.”

“The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.”

“I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.”

“Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.”

“By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.”

“I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.”

“It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.”

“I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.”

“The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.”

“Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.”

“In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.”

“Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.”

“Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?”

“Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.”

“This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.”

“One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.”

“I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.”

“My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.”