Quotes from Claude Monet

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 would love to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but I cannot find them the way I want them.

It would be asking too much to want to sell only to connoisseurs - that way starvation lies.

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.

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

What can be said about a man who is interested in nothing but his painting? It's a pity if a man can only interest himself in one thing. But I can't do any thing else. I have only one interest.

I'm continuing to work hard, not without periods of discouragement, but my strength comes back again.

My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.

When I work I forget all the rest.

Perhaps it's true that I'm very hard on myself, but that's better than exhibiting mediocre work... too few were satisfactory enough to trouble the public with.

I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.

The older I become the more I realize of that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout.

I can no longer work outside because of the intensity of the light.

The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.

I am enslaved to my work, always wanting the impossible, and never, I believe, have I been less favoured by the endlessly changeable weather.

Getting up at 4 in the morning, I slave away all day until by the evening I'm exhausted, and I end by forgetting all my responsibilities, thinking only of the work I've set out to do.

Work is nearly always a torture. If I could find something else I would be much happier, because I could use this other interest as a form of relaxation. Now I cannot relax.

These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.

I've only myself to blame for it, my impotence most of all and my weakness. If I do any good work now it will be only by chance.

Thanks to my work everything's going well; it's a great consolation.

I will bring lots of studies back with me so I can work on some big things at home.

Think of me getting up before 6, I'm at work by 7 and I continue until 6.30 in the evening, standing up all the time, nine canvases. It's murderous.

I have made tremendous efforts to work in a darker register and express the sinister and tragic quality of the place, given my natural tendency to work in light and pale tones.

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.