Top 95 Picasso Quotes

We would get 20 different angles and then cut them all together. That’s what I called it at the time – the ‘cubistic’ treatment of shooting football. It was the same thing Picasso did except we did it with a football play. It’s taking a single image and looking at it from multiple perspectives.

Raising a child is a little like Picasso’s work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.

That’s the miracle of music. No one can reinterpret a Picasso, but a song can be remixed and covered and interpreted in an infinite number of ways. It’s a living thing.

As hard as I try I cannot get myself to three museums in any one city. The only museum I’ve ever really enjoyed was the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and I think that’s because it’s small and you can touch things.

Throughout my life, there are four people I’ve met who were truly original people. The other three were Groucho Marx, Jim Morrison, and Pablo Picasso.

Picasso was hugely innovative, and, wow, did he have facility, amazing ability, but I don’t think he painted a masterpiece.

My core is grime. But I make all kinds of music. Take Picasso. He could paint whatever way he liked. He could do a little ting with a felt tip if he wanted to – it’s still going to be a bad boy Picasso at the end.

I’m not saying I’m the best. There are many painters in the world. But there is only one Picasso.

Pablo Picasso would paint a painting and hang it on the wall, and you would go and see the painting exactly how he wanted it to be made. But if you have an idea for a TV show, for example, you’re beholden to studios to produce it and distributors to distribute it.

Computers let people avoid people, going out to explore. It’s so different to just open a website instead of looking at a Picasso in a museum in Paris.

Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven’t got that kind of energy, or skill.

‘Painting like a child’ isn’t a negative for me… it’s something only great artists can really achieve. The childlike quality of some of Picasso’s drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete visions, feelings and portraits through a continuous line.

Like Picasso, I go through blue periods, green periods, or grey periods.

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.

The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.

Art is about imagination. When you look at a picture from Salvador Dali, that’s about imagination. When you look at Picasso, that’s about imagination. Doing stuff from your heart.

For me, Picasso was the ultimate man. He taught me that photography is all about how you approach an image: what you do and what you don’t do. He inspired me to go beyond what you think is in front of you.

Nobody taught Picasso how to paint – he learned for himself. And nobody can teach you to be a producer. You can learn the mechanics, but you can’t learn what’s right about a script or a director or an actor. That comes from instinct and intuition. It comes from inside you.

I really think that if I had met Picasso during peacetime, nothing would have happened.

Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison – each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.

I don’t write for a particular audience. I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.

To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, ‘I’d like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?’

My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don’t find any human content there. I’m from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

‘Matisse and Picasso’ is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn’t write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn’t write about them.

After Stalin died, the Soviet Union began inching toward the world again. The ban on jazz was lifted. Ernest Hemingway was published; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow hosted an exhibit of the works of Picasso.

Let’s look at people as artists and try to support them; just because Picasso painted a couple of bad paintings, that’s no reason to say he’s a lousy painter.

Picasso said, ‘Art is a lie that tells the truth.’ What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?

Lady Gaga is the Picasso of the entertainment world. She’s very intelligent.

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That’s called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.

Our farm is a 15-minute walk to Pablo Picasso’s last home. Alongside it stands the lovely Notre-Dame-de-Vie Chapel with its 13th-century bell tower, which was visible to Pablo from his atelier.

I’m lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don’t want a Picasso on my wall; it’s great art, but it’s dead art to me. I’d rather have a photograph by someone I’ve never heard of that really inspires me.

I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say ‘pass the mustard’.

‘Le Reve’ may be one of the three best pictures Pablo Picasso ever painted.

Most artists never get a chance to be Picasso, but that doesn’t mean you would stop painting.

For me, acting is all about the aesthetic. I just want to keep honing my craft. Not that I’m taking myself too seriously, but every artist should consider himself Picasso. Otherwise, you’re doing yourself an injustice.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, and knowing nothing about Picasso, I had the audacity to knock on his door, became his friend, and took thousands of photographs, of him, his studios, his life and his friends.

Picasso’s always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

Bitcoin, in the short or even long term, may turn out be a good investment in the same way that anything that is rare can be considered valuable. Like baseball cards. Or a Picasso.

Pablo Picasso was generous. But he always signed and dedicated his gifts even when he knew that people would sell them because they needed the money.

I think Picasso is more feminine than Matisse.

More than anything else, I’d like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso.

I remember my mother taking me to see the Picasso show in the 1940s, and I was impressed by the life and vibrancy of it all. It was a bit too avant-garde for most Londoners at the time, but since then, the city has become a centre for modern culture.

I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, ‘You can like Mozart and ice hockey…’ – and then I used to say ‘golf,’ but Tiger took over golf! – ‘and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades.’

When I was 12, I wrote a list of things to do before I died. ‘Own a Picasso’ was one of those things.

High tech is for a short time. But art is forever. People still admire a Picasso or a Van Gogh. But they don’t admire the steam locomotive anymore.

The true symbolism of every facet of ‘Guernica’ can only be guessed at, but we do know that it haunted Picasso.

Imagine if someone like John Lennon or Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Picasso, whomever, were doing their work, and some corporation, some CEO, some branding entity was saying to you, ‘Well, you can do that, but you’ve got to remove this aspect of your work.’ There would no longer be that purity anymore.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we’re both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

I don’t happen to approve of plastic surgery. I think God put plastic surgeons on this earth for good reasons – people get burned or people might have a nose like Pinocchio and that has to be fixed. But to just chop yourself up to look a few years younger? You could come out looking like a Picasso picture.