Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

"Interview with Henri Matisse" by Jacques Guenne, L'Art Vivant (15 September 1925), translated by Jack Flam in Matisse on Art (1995) - 1920 -1940