+ It (painting) can be as violent as fucking, like an orgasm or an ejaculation. The result is often disappointing, but the process is highly exciting.

+ My painting is not violent; it’s life that is violent.

+ Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.

+ My painting is a representation of life, my own life above all, which has been very difficult. So perhaps my painting is very violent, but this is natural to me.

+ I have been lucky enough to be able to live on my obsession. This is my only success.

+ I have no moral lesson to preach, nor any advice to give.

+ Flesh and meat are life! If I paint red meat as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful.

+ Ham, pigs, tongues, sides of beef seen in the butcher’s window, all that death, I find it very beautiful. And it’s all for sale—how unbelievably surrealistic!

+ I often imagine that the accident that made man into the animal he has become also happened to other animals—lions or hyenas for example—while man remained a primate. What would have happened? It’s bizarre, I have never read anything about it, by Darwin or anyone else. Perhaps it’s science fiction, but it’s very interesting. I imagine men hanging in butcher’s shops for hyenas, who would be dressed in fur coats. The men would be hung by their feet, or cut up for stew or kebabs.

+ We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream, and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.

+ The men I painted were all in extreme situations, and the scream is a transcription of their pain.

+ This is the artist’s privilege—to be ageless.

+ When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.