I have a great admiration for Toulouse-Lautrec as a person. He was a profoundly good man, who always looked kindly on his fellow beings. In the whorehouse, he painted a poor, tired girl. Although he was constantly in physical pain, he never complained and was always even-tempered. He had a remarkable capacity for always being the same, whether he was talking to a VIP or a laundry maid. He had a voracious appetite for life and burned the candle at both ends, painting by day and drinking by night. [...] I love his great originality as a painter. He was one of the Impressionists but he stands alone from them. He never painted a single landscape. Nature bored him stiff. He was only interested in people. He painted real and hard and broke new ground with his staggeringly modern compositions. He wouldn’t hesitate to cut a face in half, like in a newspaper photo. (Roger Planchon in “Le Parisien”, September 9th 1998)