Edvard Munch

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

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.