Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

This aphorism is credited to Picasso almost universally, yet no primary source has ever been produced for it. The sentiment is genuinely Picassian — he returned repeatedly to the idea that children create with a genius that formal training tends to extinguish, and he famously said it took him a lifetime to learn to draw like a child — but that is a thematic match, not a documented utterance. The earliest known attribution surfaces in Time magazine in October 1976, three years after Picasso's death in 1973, printed with no source or context, after which it spread through The Rotarian, Reader's Digest, and later quotation dictionaries that could only tag it "recalled on his death." We checked his minor and posthumously collected statements, published correspondence, and reprinted interviews and speeches, along with the French-language corpus where any original would likely appear; the one traceable lead — that it came from a 1936 interview in The Arts — collapses on inspection, since that magazine published his real "art is a lie" statement in 1923, not this line. We therefore treat it as authentically attributed to Picasso by long consensus but unverified at the source.