Pablo Picasso Quotes on Art and Creativity: Which Are Really His

A Collection of Quotes Attributed to Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso is one of the most quoted artists who ever lived, and one of the most misquoted. Some of the sayings that travel under his name come from real interviews published in his lifetime. Others first appeared years after his death in 1973, and a few belong to other people entirely, from Vincent van Gogh to T. S. Eliot.

This guide takes the long list of creativity quotes that has circulated on art blogs since the 2010s and sorts it by what can actually be traced. You will find the lines with a documented source, the famous ones that are disputed or borrowed, and the many that simply have no known origin. Along the way, each idea is explained in plain words, so you can see what Picasso was getting at, and the photographs show him at home, at work and with the people around him.

Who Picasso was, in brief

Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, on 25 October 1881 and died in Mougins, in the south of France, on 8 April 1973. He spent most of his adult life in France. In 1907 he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which is often called the first step toward Cubism, and over the next years he developed the Cubist style with Georges Braque and helped invent collage.

His output was enormous. When he died, his estate still held more than 45,000 unsold works, including almost 1,900 paintings, more than 1,200 sculptures and about 7,000 drawings, and the catalogue of his paintings and drawings runs past 16,000 entries. He married twice, to the dancer Olga Khokhlova in 1918 and to Jacqueline Roque in 1961, and had four children: Paulo, Maya, Claude and Paloma.

He also talked a great deal, to critics, friends and journalists, and he loved paradox. That habit is one reason so many sharp one-liners have attached themselves to him, whether he said them or not.

Picasso plays in the sea with his son Claude, who was born in 1947, in a photo usually dated 1948 and placed at Vallauris on the French Riviera. In those years Picasso lived on the coast with Claude's mother, the painter Françoise Gilot. The picture shows a side of him that the famous quotations rarely capture: an ageing artist simply enjoying a summer afternoon with a toddler.

Lines with a documented source

The best-known quotation with a clear origin is from an interview titled "Picasso Speaks", published in the New York magazine The Arts in May 1923. In it he explained his view of what painting does:

"We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand." (Picasso, The Arts, 1923)

In the same interview he argued that in art, finding matters more than searching. The British painter Graham Sutherland later reported him boiling that idea down to four words, "I do not seek, I find," in a 1936 essay. Both lines describe the same attitude: art is judged by what it achieves, not by the intentions or theories behind it.

Several other lines from the list can be traced to print sources in or close to his lifetime:

Accidents. In a 1956 interview in Vogue he said that trying to correct an accident is pointless, because the accidental shows who a person really is.
Training in beauty. In a 1935 conversation with the critic Christian Zervos for Cahiers d'Art, he dismissed academic teaching about beauty as a sham that had deceived generations. The same interview contains his idea that a picture is a sum of destructions, which is probably the real root of the popular line about creation starting with destruction.
Yellow spots and suns. The film director Sergei Eisenstein quoted him in Film Form: some painters reduce the sun to a yellow spot, while others turn a yellow spot into the sun.
God as an artist. In 1964 The Atlantic reported his joke that God has no real style and just keeps trying new things, inventing the giraffe, the elephant and the cat.
Success. A line printed in the magazine The Artist in 1978 warns that success is dangerous because it tempts an artist to copy himself, which he considered worse than copying others. The popular short version about copying oneself being pathetic is a loose paraphrase of it.
Art and chastity. His biographer Antonina Vallentin recorded him saying in 1963 that real art is never chaste and is, in that sense, dangerous.
The Moon landing. The New York Times reported on 21 July 1969 that when asked about Apollo 11, he said it meant nothing to him and he had no opinion.
Last words. The 1980 book Exits records that he died after asking friends to drink to his health, since he could no longer drink himself.
Emotions from everywhere. The line about the artist as a container for feelings arriving from the sky, the earth, a scrap of paper or a spider's web appears in a slightly different wording in Richard Friedenthal's 1963 anthology Letters of the Great Artists.

Finally, the one most likely to be printed on a studio wall is from LIFE magazine, 11 September 1964: "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

Picasso stands in his studio at Villa La Californie, his house above Cannes, beside Bettina Graziani, one of the best-known fashion models of the 1950s. The portrait is credited to the American photographer Mark Shaw, who worked for LIFE. The cluttered room, full of canvases and objects, was itself something of a work in progress.

A black-and-white portrait shows Picasso in a dark sweater leaning over a table covered with clay pieces. From the late 1940s he made and painted ceramics at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris, where he also met Jacqueline Roque, and he treated the workshop as seriously as his studio. Many of his remarks about technique and craft date from this period of hands-on experiment.

Famous lines that are disputed or belong to someone else

"Good artists copy, great artists steal." This is probably the most repeated "Picasso quote" in the world, and nobody has found it in anything he said or wrote. Wikiquote lists it as disputed, with its earliest attribution to him in a 1989 computer magazine. Steve Jobs helped make it famous by repeating it in the 1980s and 1990s. The idea itself is older: T. S. Eliot wrote in 1920 that immature poets imitate while mature poets steal.

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." This short version first appears in print in 1983, where the author called the attribution rumoured. It may be a compressed memory of a longer remark in William Fifield's 1964 interview material, so it is fair to call it attributed but not exact.

"Every child is an artist." The researchers at Quote Investigator found that the line was first credited to Picasso in a Time magazine epigraph in October 1976, three and a half years after he died, with no source. The idea that children lose their natural creativity as they grow up had been expressed since at least 1907, and John Lennon said something very similar in a 1969 interview.

Always doing what you cannot do. The line about doing things you cannot yet do in order to learn them comes from a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his friend Anthon van Rappard in 1885. It was later reassigned to Picasso in quotation books.

Picasso relaxes in his studio in a white Tulip chair, the pedestal chair designed by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in the mid-1950s. Around him are canvases, flowers and a crowded worktable. The modern chair in an old-fashioned room is a neat summary of his own mix of tradition and novelty.

Popular lines with no known source

A large part of the original list has no source in standard collections such as Wikiquote. That does not prove Picasso never said them, but it means they should be shared as "attributed to Picasso" rather than as his words. They fall into a few themes.

Simplicity. The idea that art means removing everything that is not needed, and that he painted things as he thought them rather than as he saw them.
Work and action. Sayings that action is the key to success, that only what you actually do counts, that work which does not trouble you is no good, and that a working life can be as happy as free time.
Imagination. The claim that everything you can imagine is real, and the line comparing painting to keeping a diary.
Taste and fashion. Several versions of the remark that good taste is the enemy of creativity, plus complaints that the art world is full of impostors and that museums are full of lies.
Childhood and genius. A longer passage saying that the genius seen in children disappears as they grow up, so a real painter must start again from zero.
Craft. Lines about drawing as a kind of hypnotism, Matisse's habit of redrawing the same sketch, colours that seem to sing together, and the egg at the end of a search for pure form.
Finishing. The complaint that to finish a picture is to kill it and take away its soul.
Self-mockery. The joke that his mother expected him to become a general or a Pope, and the claim that he was only a public entertainer who understood his age.

Some of these may well come from conversations recorded by friends such as Françoise Gilot or the photographer Brassaï, but without a page reference it is safest to treat them as unconfirmed.

Picasso dances barefoot in his studio with Jacqueline Roque, who became his second wife in 1961. The photo is credited to David Douglas Duncan, an American photojournalist who became a close friend and photographed the couple many times at home. Behind them are large drawings and canvases waiting to be finished, or perhaps deliberately left unfinished.

Picasso lifts a huge shaggy dog, identified in circulating captions as Bob, a Great Pyrenees, outside the Château de Boisgeloup in Normandy, where he kept a home and sculpture studio in the early 1930s. The caption usually dates it to 1932. Dogs and cats appear again and again in photographs of his homes.

What his ideas about creativity add up to

Read together, the sourced and the attributed lines point in the same direction. Picasso distrusted rules, theories and polite taste. He thought art should be judged by what it does to the viewer, not by whether it follows a canon of beauty. He valued accident, speed and the first attempt, and he believed that repeating your own success was a dead end.

He was also deeply serious about craft. The same man who joked about God trying out the giraffe spent decades learning printmaking, ceramics and sculpture, and destroyed or reworked canvases until they satisfied him. The 1935 idea of a picture as a sum of destructions is not a slogan about smashing things; it describes a working method in which each stage is painted over by the next.

For anyone trying to be more creative, the practical lessons are simple: start making things instead of waiting for inspiration, let mistakes show you something, avoid copying yourself, and keep looking at the world with a child's curiosity. Those ideas stand on their own, whoever first put them into words.

This black-and-white portrait, credited in circulation to the Spanish photographer Carlos Nadal and dated 1960, shows Picasso in his familiar striped Breton shirt holding a tabby cat. A tinted version of the same image opens this article. Cats turn up often in his paintings too, sometimes playful and sometimes fierce.

Picasso talks with the French actress Brigitte Bardot in a photo usually dated to the 1950s, when she was becoming an international star. He wears a checked shirt; she listens with her hair tied up. Meetings like this helped make him a celebrity well beyond the art world.

How to quote Picasso responsibly

If you want to use one of these lines in a talk, essay or social post, a few habits help. Prefer the versions with a named publication and date, such as the 1923 Arts interview or the 1964 LIFE line. Add "attributed to" for the untraced ones. And avoid the copy-and-steal line altogether unless you explain its real history, because readers who know it is doubtful will doubt everything else you say.

It is also worth pairing a quote with an actual artwork. Take the 1923 idea of art as a lie that reveals truth and look at a Cubist portrait: the distorted face is plainly not how a person looks, yet it can tell you more about seeing than a photograph does. To explore digitized artworks alongside your reading about creativity, see Paris Musées Online: Find Art and Free-to-Use Images.

Picasso works on Guernica in his Paris studio in 1937, photographed by Dora Maar, the photographer and painter who was his partner at the time. She documented every stage of the huge canvas, which he painted in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German and Italian aircraft during the Spanish Civil War. Her photographs are now a key record of how one of the most famous anti-war paintings took shape.

Sources: Wikipedia: Pablo Picasso; Wikiquote: Pablo Picasso (sourced, disputed and misattributed quotes); Quote Investigator: Every child is an artist; Quote Investigator: Good artists copy, great artists steal; original list: Art-Sheep. Photographs credited in captions where known.

More quotes from the archive: