The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all — Paul Klee

"As time passes I become more and more afraid of my growing love of music. I don’t understand myself. I play solo sonatas by Bach: next to them, what is Böcklin? It makes me smile."

"Music, for me, is a love bewitched. / Fame as a painter? / Writer, modern poet? Bad joke. / So I have no calling, and loaf."

"Twenty-one years old! I never doubted my vital force. But how is it to fare with my chosen art? The recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after all, should be no hindrance in the plastic arts! And should I really have to be a poet, Lord knows what else I should desire. Certainly, a sea swells within me, for I feel. It is a hopeless state, to feel in such a way that the storm rages on all sides at once and that nowhere is a lord who commands the chaos."

"You know what I want to become temporarily today: a painter? No. A simple and common designer. But a biting one. I would like to deride humanity, nothing less. And this with the simplest means, in black and white. At the same time - oh blasphemy - I would like to attack our Lord adequately."

"My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones."

"Beyond the constructive elements of the picture, I studied the tonalities of nature by adding layer upon layer of diluted black watercolour paint. Each layer must dry well. In this way a mathematically correct scale of light and dark values is the result. Squinting facilitates our perception of this phenomenon in nature."