You have long known what I have tried to establish: the right to dare everything; yet the difficulty I have had finding enough money to live on has been too great, and my capacities have not produced a very big result but the mechanism has got underway nevertheless. The public does not owe me anything because the pictorial work I have done is only relatively good, but the painters who benefit from that freedom today do owe me something.

Letter to George-Daniel de Monfreid (Marquesas Islands, October 1902), p. 214. - 'The Writings of a Savage' (1990)