Coming from Chicago, I like a white Christmas.
I seem initially to have followed Fauvism, and then to have followed in Cézanne's footsteps. Whatever - I do not mind. . . as long as first of all I remained Vlaminck.
Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.
When I get my hands on painting materials I don't give a damn about other people's painting. . . every generation must start again afresh.
I knew neither jealousy nor hate but was possessed by a rage to recreate a new world, the world which my eyes perceived, a world all to myself. I was poor but I knew that life is beautiful.
What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb which would have led to the scaffold I tried to achieve in painting by using color of maximum purity. In this way I satisfied my urge to destroy old conventions, to disobey in order to re-create a tangible, living, and liberated world.
I was poor but I knew that life is beautiful. And I had no other ambition than to discover with the help of new means those deep inner ties that linked me to the very soil.
I still love to go back to Mitchell [his home town] and wander up and down those streets. It just kind of reassures me again that there is a place that I know thoroughly, where the roots are deep. Everything had a place, a specific definition.
Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it’s as if the audience—dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing—is part of the band.
I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything. I believe that literature needs to be a machine of illusions.
Everybody's a filmmaker today.