Karel Appel quotes:

My brush-strokes start in nothing and they end in nothing, and in-between you find the image.

As an artist you have to fight and survive the wilderness to keep your creative freedom. Creativity is very fragile.

I'm not a pessimist. Maybe I don't have a primitive feeling of happiness, that is true. Sometimes my color is happy but not the expression.

Every day I have to be awake to escape.. ..The whole world is sleepy. It is a real fight to be awake, to see everything new, for the first time in your life.

I don't paint, I hit.

My paint is like a rocket, which describes its own space. I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot foresee, it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast. To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars.

The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens.

When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.

You have to learn it all, then forget it and start again like a child. This is the inner evolution.

If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age