# Quote — Marc Chagall, My Life

> But my knowledge of Marxism was limited to knowing that Marx was a Jew, and that he had a long white beard. I said to Lunatcharsky [the political communist commissar for Education, ca. 1918] 'Whatever you do, don't ask me why I painted in blue or green, and why you can see a calf inside the cow's belly, etc. On the other hand you're welcome: if Marx is so wise, let him come back to life and explain it himself'. I showed him my canvases.

- Author: [Marc Chagall](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marc-chagall.md)
- Book: [My Life](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marc-chagall/my-life.md)
- Page: 34
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marc_Chagall#My_Life_(1922)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/marc-chagall/my-life/but-my-knowledge

## More from this book

> Only the great distance that separates Paris from my native town prevented me from going back.. .It was the Louvre that put end to all these hesitations. When I walked around the circular Veronese room and the rooms that the works of Manet, Delacroix and Courbet are in, I desired nothing more. In my imagination Russia [where Chagall was born] took the form of a basket suspended from a parachute. The deflated pear of the balloon was hanging down, growing cold and descending slowly in the course of the years. This was how Russian art appeared to me, or something of the sort.. .It was as if Russian art had been fatally condemned to remain in the wake of the West. (a later quote on his first arrival in Paris, 1910)

p. 261 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marc-chagall/my-life/only-the-great.md)

> It's only my town (Chagall was born in Vitebsk), mine, which I have rediscovered. I come back to it with emotion. It was at that time that I painted my Vitebsk series of 1914. (Chagall couldn't go back to Paris because of the outbreak of the first World War in 1914) I painted everything that met my eyes. I painted at my window; I never walked down the street without my box of paint.

p. 31 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marc-chagall/my-life/its-only-my-town.md)

> Two or three o'clock in the morning. The sky is blue. Dawn is breaking. Down there, a little way off, they slaughtered cattle, cows bellowed, and I painted them. I used to sit up like that all night long. It's already a week since the studio was cleaned out. Frames, eggshells, empty two-sou soup tins lie about higgledy-piggledy.. .On the shelves, reproductions of El Greco and Cézanne lay next tot the remains of a herring I had cut in two, the head for the first day, the tail for the next, and Thank God, a few crusts of bread.

p. 29 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marc-chagall/my-life/two-or-three.md)