Edvard Munch

From my rotting body, flowers will grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

I have inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemies - the heritage of consumption and insanity - illness and madness and death are the black angels that have watched over my cradle.

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.

The Scream was born in my soul.

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun went down – I felt a wave of melancholy – suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death – over the blue-black fjord and city hung blood and tongues of fire – My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I felt an endless scream passing through nature.

Art is an externalization of inner life.

My art is rooted in a single great event, the death of my mother.

Illness, madness and death are the black angels that guarded my cradle and have since accompanied me throughout my life.

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.

The camera cannot compete with the brush and palette, until photography can be used in heaven or hell.

One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord – the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.

I paint not what I see, but what I saw.

My art is really a voluntary confession and an attempt to make clear to myself my relationship to life – it is, therefore, a kind of egoism, but I am constantly hoping that through this I can help others achieve clarity.

The colours shrieked.

My pictures are my children.

The sun no longer shines for me. I am alone in the world, and I feel as if I am walking through a desert.

I have always been ill, and I have always been alone.

My art is an attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.

I don't believe in art that is not born out of the necessity of man to open his heart.

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.