Edvard Munch

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

My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.

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

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

Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being… You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.

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.

My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are?

Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I try to dissect souls.

There is a battle that goes on between men and women. Many people call it love.

I build a kind of wall between myself and the model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.

And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?

I felt as if there were invisible threads connecting us – I felt the invisible strands of her hair still winding around me – and thus as she disappeared completely beyond the sea – I still felt it, felt the pain where my heart was bleeding – because the threads could not be severed.

My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious – to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.

I burned with wine and memory of the dark eyes—I was intense and talked to Fru L of love and pleasure.

—I have kissed a corpse such was that kiss—

I admire how you let your body and my body die in your love—but you must forgive me if I do not feel the heat of this love in myself.

I think I am suited only to paint pictures so I know that I must choose between love—and my work.

I don't have any more hope. Nothing to expect with joy so why work - why bother when I will have to eventually die one day. The knowledge to have done something great should be its own recompose. Which is the best painting? A miserable copy, a miserable representation of life.

I remained immobile trembling from anguish and I heard bounce through nature an immense infinite scream.

Could only have been painted by a madman.