EDVARD MUNCH

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?

I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

The rich man who gives, steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.

Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.

Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.

The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.

I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.

Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.

It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.