"Mengs [the official royal painter of the Spanish court] gave Goya official help and encouragement. Tiepolo [famous mural painter then] however, directly influenced his [Goya's] art. It was an odd juxtaposition.. ..at the end of the eighteenth century, two artists more unlike one another fostering the career of a third [young Goya].. ..What Goya recognized in Tiepolo was his abundant appetite for fantasy and caprice."

"..and much of his works consists of portraits that, fairly seen, are not in the least derogatory of those who commissioned them. The idea of Goya as an artist naturally 'against' the system is pretty much a modern myth. But it is based on a fundamental truth of his character; he was a man of great and by times heroic independence.."

"He [Goya] once declared that his real masters were Vélasquez, Rembrandt and Nature. Vélasquez of course he knew intimately being surrounded in Madrid.. .He would have known Rembrandt only through prints, since so little work of the Dutch master's painted work has made its way to Spain."

"[because Goya was] the stepping stone between the Old Masters and the Great Moderns like Cézanne."

"God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed."

"I find it [science] analytical, pretentious and superficial—largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox—in other words,—all the things I love the most."

"Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams."

"The story is also a sequence of moral and surrealist aesthetic. The sexual instinct and the sense of death form its substance. (The golden age)"

"A paranoiac is like a poet, born, not made. (Un paranoico como un poeta, nace, no se hace)"

"I like go to bed and get up early; in that, I am anti-Spanish."

"Like the majority of deaf people, I don't like blind people much."

"Salvador Dali seduced many ladies, particularly American ladies, but these seductions usually consisted of stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman's shoulders and, without a word, showing them the door."

"In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival."

"If you were to ask me if I'd ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I'd have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead."

"If someone were to prove to me- right this minute- that God, in all his luminescence, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior."

"Frankly, despite my distaste of the press, I'd love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers."

"Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese you dingus"

"Thank God I'm an atheist."