Art has a harmony which parallels that of nature. The people who tell you that the artist is always inferior to nature are idiots! He is parallel to it. Unless, of course, he deliberately intervenes. His whole aim must be silence. He must silence all the voices of prejudice within him, he must forget... And then the entire landscape will engrave itself on the sensitive plate of his being.

p. 150, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif' - Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906)