Quotes from Joan Miro

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.

I make no distinction between poetry and painting.

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness; a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche.

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.. ..it must fertilize the imagination.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

The more ignoble I find life, the more strongly I react by contradiction, in humour and in an outburst of liberty and expansion.

What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman.

What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman.

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.

Puedes contemplar una imagen durante toda una semana y no volver a pensar en ella de nuevo. Aunque también puedes mirar una foto tan solo un segundo y recordarla toda la vida.

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

What I am looking for... is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term 'mute music'.

I believe that to do anything in this world one needs a love for risk and adventure, and above all, to be able to do without what middle-class families call "future."

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.

That which interests me above all else is the calligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of grass.

My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.

The simplest things give me ideas.

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

The more I work, the more I want to work.