Claude Monet

I was definitely born under an evil star. I have just been thrown out of the inn where I was staying, naked as a worm.

Finally here is a beautiful day, a superb sun like at Giverny. So I worked without stopping, for the tide at this moment is just as I need it for several motifs. This has bucked me up a bit.

There, the grand lines of mountain and sea are admirable, and apart from the exotic vegetation that is here, Monte Carlo is certainly the most beautiful spot of the entire coast: the motifs there are more complete, more picturelike, and consequently easier to execute.

I am installed in a fairylike place. I do not know where to poke my head; everything is superb, and I would like to do everything, so I use up and squander lots of color, for there are trials to be made.

I will do water - beautiful, blue water.

I have always worked better alone and from my own impressions.

I am working, but when one has ceased to do seascape, it is the devil afterward - very difficult; it changes at every instant, and here the weather varies several times in the same day.

I pass my time in the open air on the beach when it is really heavy weather or when the boats go out fishing.

I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillere for which I've done a few bad rough sketches, but it is a dream. Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

Among the seascapes, I am doing the regattas of Le Havre with many figures on the beach and the outer harbor covered with small sails.

I wear myself out and struggle with the sun. And what a sun here! It would be necessary to paint here with gold and gemstones. It is wonderful.

I have never had a studio, and I do not understand shutting oneself up in a room. To draw, yes; to paint, no.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

It is extraordinary to see the sea; what a spectacle! She is so unfettered that one wonders whether it is possible that she again become calm.

Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.