Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

— Salvador Dali

I toyed with making portraits based on people's discarded shopping lists found on the street, or old diaries bought on eBay, or other forms…

— Sophie Blackall

As a boy, I used to look at reproductions of Rembrandt's portraits... the people in his paintings were so real I felt I knew…

— David Cobley

Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

— Blaise Pascal

So long as people expect paintings to be simply coloured photographs they get no individuality and, in the case of portraits, no characterisation.

— William Dobell

A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.

— John Singer Sargent

One is never satisfied with a portrait of persons whom one knows. That is why I have always pitied portraitists. One demands so seldom…

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of…

— Georg Baselitz

I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold.

— Jacques-Louis David

I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in…

— John Singer Sargent

The future turns out to be something that you make instead of find. It isn't waiting for your arrival, either with an arrest warrant…

— Lewis H. Lapham

People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

— Robert Mapplethorpe

Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.

— Ira Glass

In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.

— Mary Ellen Mark

In 1984, I was contacted by Michael Taylor, who had won a commission from a sponsor and decided he would like to paint a…

— Julian Bream