André Derain

"There is only one kind of painting: landscape. It is the most difficult. It has also, I believe, the most simple kind of composition. Because no one can stop us from imagining the world in the way that pleases us most."

"I have found a boat, small with two sails, that would make me happy. Unfortunately, I need one hundred francs.. ..and I haven't got it! If you want, I could give you two canvases which you could sell, just to make you some many and you could give me the hundred francs.. .Kahnweiler [Paris' art-dealer] is the only one who gives me money, and just what we need to live on."

"What, after all, is a pretty woman? It's a mere subjective impression – what you yourself think of her. That's what I paint, another kind of beauty of my own."

"There is often more psychic appeal in a so-called ugly woman than there is in a pretty one; and, in my ideal, I reconstruct her to bring that beauty forth in terms of line or volume."

"If I paint a girl in the sunlight, it's the sunlight I am painting, not the real girl; and even for that I should have the sunlight on my palette. I don't care for an accidental effect of light and shade, a thing of 'mere charm'."

"The Japanese see things that way. They don't paint sunlight, they don't cast shadows that perplex one and falsify the true shape of things. The Egyptian figures have simplicity, dignity, directness, unity; they express motion almost as if by a conventional formula, like writing itself, so direct it is. So I seek a logical method of rendering my idea."

"These Africans being primitive, uncomplex, uncultured, can express their thought by a direct appeal to the instinct. Their carvings are informed with emotions. So Nature gives me the material with which to construct a world of my own, governed, not by literal limitations, but by instinct and sentiment."

"In the years that followed [i.e. 1905 onwards], Derain made a great series of compositions with life-size figures. Some of them he exhibited in the ['Salon des] Indépendants' – a bullfight, a painting with bathers. The bathers were luckily bought and remain preserved for us. Derain burnt all the others in 1908, you see. Not even photographs of them are in existence. Thus the most important original material for the investigation of his development in 1907 is missing.. .[During the 1905–1907 period] he pursued an entirely different path."

"Neither Derain, nor myself, were what was conveniently called in this period the bohemians, the bad men: we were simply nonconformists, the outsiders"

"[K]nowing both [ Picasso and Derain], I feel personally (though I should like to express it as tentatively and hesitatingly as possible) that Derain, by pushing along the road which Picasso pointed down only to turn aside, has arrived at a weightier, more moving conception of pictorial expression."