A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.
Edvard Munch

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.
Edvard Munch

Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.
Edvard Munch

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.
Edvard Munch

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.
Edvard Munch

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

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

I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.
Edvard Munch

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

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.
Edvard Munch


I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.
Edvard Munch

I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.
Edvard Munch

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.
Edvard Munch

In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.
Edvard Munch

It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.
Edvard Munch

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

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.
Edvard Munch

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?
Edvard Munch

One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.
Edvard Munch

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.
Edvard Munch