Claude Monet Quotes
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To have gone to all this trouble to get to this is just too stupid! Outside there's brilliant sunshine but I don't feel up to looking at it.
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Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.
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My heart is forever in Giverny.
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No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.
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It would be asking too much to want to sell only to connoisseurs - that way starvation lies.
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My rejection at the Salon brought an end to my hesitation [to settle in Paris] since after this failure I can no longer claim to cope... alas, that fatal rejection has virtually taken the bread out of my mouth.
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I've only myself to blame for it, my impotence most of all and my weakness. If I do any good work now it will be only by chance.
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I've always refused requests even from friends to employ a technique I know nothing about.
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Now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been. I still hold out some hope of doing better, but age and unhappiness have sapped my strength.
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While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose.
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I am enslaved to my work, always wanting the impossible, and never, I believe, have I been less favoured by the endlessly changeable weather.
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I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
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Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.
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A good impression is lost so quickly.
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No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
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I still don't know where I am going to sleep tomorrow.
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One can do something if one can see and understand it.
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When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can't think any more.
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For almost two months now I've been struggling away with no result.
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I'm very happy, very delighted. I'm setting to like a fighting cockerel, for I'm surrounded here by all that I love.
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I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot; and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.
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Perhaps it's true that I'm very hard on myself, but that's better than exhibiting mediocre work... too few were satisfactory enough to trouble the public with.
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If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!
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What could be said about me...a man to whom only his painting matters? And of course his garden and his flowers as well.