..My paintings are a heap of shit, but better than Modigliani, Marc Chagall, and Krémènge [a Russian companion painter]. Some day I will destroy my canvases, but they are too cowardly to do it.

In: Soutine et son temps, Emile Szittya, La Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris, 1955, pp. 107-108; as quoted in Chaim Soutine, Catalogue Raisonné, eds. Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow, Klaus Perls, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, pp. 38, 46-47

in fact Soutine destroyed more than hundreds of his paintings - many of them he painted in Ceret before 1930