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

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

- 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

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

- Edvard Munch

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

- Edvard Munch

The rich man who gives, steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.

- Edvard Munch

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.

- 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

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

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

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

- 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

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

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

- 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

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

- 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

Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.

- Edvard Munch