Sourced

• Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.
  • As quoted in Claude Monet: Les Nymphéas (1926) by Georges Clemenceau, Ch. 2.

• I can no longer work outside because of the intensity of the light.
  • In the summer of 1920 to Gustave Geffroy. Monet in the 20th Century, by Paul Hayes Tucker.

• I see less and less....I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up....I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf.
  • January 1921 to journalist Marcel Pays. Monet in the 20th Century, by Paul Hayes Tucker.

Unsourced

• Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

• Water Lilies is an extention of my life. Without the water, the lilies cannot live, as I am without art.

• I paint.. as a bird sings.

• Durand-Ruel, became for us, our saviour. For more than fifteen years, my painting as well as that of Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro had no other market than through him.