Quotes from Edvard Munch

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.

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

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

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

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

To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.

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

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.

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.

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.

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.

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.

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.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I shall be in them.

There is a battle that goes on between men and women. Many people call it love.

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

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

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

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

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

I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of man's urge to open his heart

A work of art comes only from inside a human being.

Photography is an art which touches and grips one's own heart's blood.

Anybody who perceives colors can become a painter. It's simply a question of whether or not one has felt anything and whether one has the courage to recount the things one has felt.