I started to introduce letters into my pictures [his first collage art — Georges Braque

"In art progress consists not in extension but in the knowledge of its limits."

"I will try to explain what I mean by metamorphosis. For me no object can be tied down to any sort of reality. A stone may be part of a wall, a piece of sculpture, a lethal weapon, a pebble on a beach or anything else you like.. ..when you ask me whether a particular in one of my paintings depicts a womans head, a fish, a vase, a bird, or all four at once, I cant give you a categorical answer, for this metamorphosic confusion is fundamental to the poetry."

"Speaking purely for myself, I can say that it was my very acute feeling for the matière, for the substance of painting, which pushed me into thinking about the possibilities of the medium. I wanted to create a kind of substance by means of brush-work. But that is the kind of discovery which one makes gradually, though once a beginning had been made other discoveries follow. Thus it was that I subsequently began to introduce sand, sawdust and metal filings into my pictures. For I suddenly saw the extent to which colour is related to the substance.. .So my great delight was the material character which I could give to my pictures by introducing these extraneous elements. In short, they provided me with a means of getting further away from idealism in representing the things with which I was concerned."

"The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact."

"By using a white paint applied to the canvas I make a napkin. But I am sure the white shape is something conceived before knowing what it was to become. This means that a certain transformation has taken place.. .In a painting, what counts is the unexpected."

"Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise."