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

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

I do not paint what I see, but what I saw. — Edvard Munch

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. — Edvard Munch

If what you want to paint is the emotive mood in all its strength… then you must not sit and stare at everything and depict it exactly as one sees it. — Edvard Munch

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights. — Edvard Munch

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. — Edvard Munch

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

It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes. — Edvard Munch

Oil–painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards? — Edvard Munch

The viewers must come to understand the sacredness of painting, so they will remove their hats as if they were in church. — Edvard Munch

The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories–those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines. — Edvard Munch

I don’t believe in an art that is not born out of man’s need to open his heart. — Edvard Munch

Art comes from joy and pain…But mostly from pain. — Edvard Munch

Without fear and disease, my life would be like a boat without oars. — Edvard Munch

My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are? … my art gives meaning to my life. — Edvard Munch

What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives. — Edvard Munch

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. — Edvard Munch

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

My breakthrough came very late in life, really only starting when I was 50…I had the strength for new deeds and ideas. — Edvard Munch

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

Through my art I have tried to explain my life and its meaning. I have also intended to help others to clarify their lives. — Edvard Munch

And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell? — Edvard Munch

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

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. — Edvard Munch

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. — Edvard Munch

Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash. — Edvard Munch

A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man. — Edvard Munch

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

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. — Edvard Munch

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

But can they [great works] get rid of the worm that lies gnawing at the roots of my heart? No, never. — Edvard Munch

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