Claude Monet — "I'm completely worn out. I need a long vacation."

"I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel."

"I am completely absorbed in my work, and I am not thinking of anything else."

"I get madder and madder on giving back what I feel."

"No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others."

"These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession for me. It is beyond my strength as an old man, and yet I want to render what I feel."