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For Christ’s sake, when are we going to see a generation of artists with healthy bodies? Sometimes I’m really furious with myself because it isn’t good enough to be iller or less ill than others, the ideal thing would be to have a strong enough constitution to live for 80 years and along with that, blood that was real good blood.

Considering, if you will, the times in which we live as a true and great revival of art, the moth-eaten and official tradition, which is still on its feet, but which is at bottom powerless and bone-idle, the new painters, alone, poor, treated like madmen and as a result of this treatment becoming so in fact, at least as far as their social life is concerned.

Mr Rey says that instead of eating enough and regularly I have been particularly sustaining myself with coffee and alcohol. I admit all that, but it will still be true that I had to key myself up a bit to reach the high yellow note I reached this summer. That, after all, the artist is a man at work, and that it’s not for the first passer-by who comes along to vanquish him once and for all.

For a long time I’ve been touched by the fact that Japanese artists very often made exchanges among themselves. It clearly proves that they liked one another and stuck together, and that there was a certain harmony among them and that they did indeed live a kind of brotherly life, in a natural way and not in the midst of intrigues. The more we resemble them in that respect, the better it will be for us. It seems, too, that those Japanese earned very little money and lived like simple labourers. I have the reproduction of a Japanese drawing: A single blade of grass. What an example of awareness!