Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by Francoise Gilot

Matisse was my God. I'm a French artist, that's for sure. I am color-oriented and what you might call a composer. I am not pouring my guts out; I keep them inside.

I really think that if I had met Picasso during peacetime, nothing would have happened.

'Matisse and Picasso' is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn't write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn't write about them.

I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.

What I like about the American woman is she usually has a lot of dynamism. In the U.S., women have a tendency to go forward, to be more exaggerated than in Europe. Many times the rough ideas come from the States, then they are refined in Europe. The American women and the French women are still the best-dressed.

I'm not going to talk about Picasso. I have done my duty to those memories. I have had a great career as an artist myself, you know. I'm not here just because I've spent time with Picasso.

To change your mind about something is always difficult. I think that people who are big enough to admit they were wrong can be counted on your fingers.

For me, style is essentially doing things well. If you want to be outrageous, be outrageous with style. If you want to be restrained, be restrained with style. One can't specifically define style. It's like the perfume to a flower. It's a quality you can't analyze.

We mustn't be afraid of inventing anything...Everething there is in us exists in nature. After all, we're part of nature. If it resembles nature, that's fine. If it doesn't, what of it? When man wanted to invent something as useful as the human foot, he invented the wheel, which he used to transport himself and his burdens. The fact that the wheel doesn't have the slightest resemblance to the human foot is hardly a criticism of it.

I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid.

You see, for me a painting is a dramatic action in the course of which the reality finds itself split apart. For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other considerations. The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I'm concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic art, the moment at which the universe comes out of itself and meets its own destruction.

Most women who have done something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone.

No one is indispensable to anyone else. You imagine you're necessary to him or that he will be very unhappy if you leave him, but I'm sure that if you do, within three months he will have fitted another face into your role and you'll see that no one is suffering because of your absence. You must feel free to do whatever feels best to you. Being someone's nurse is no way to live unless you're unable to do anything else. You have to say something on your own and you ought to be thinking, first and foremost, about that.