Portraits Quotes · Page 4

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.

— Victor Skrebneski

A photographic portrait needs more collaboration between sitter and artist than a painted portrait.

— Alvin Langdon Coburn

Your dreams are the product of your longings, a portrait of your potential, and a promise of your future.

— Erwin McManus

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

— Lucian Freud

The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.

— Joyce Maynard

Dreams are like portraits; and we find they please because they are confessed resemblances.

— George Crabbe

That moment when the person actually dictates the way I do the portrait is when the intimacy arrives.

— Francesco Clemente

Being a digital photographer I'm in awe of the older generation of photographers who created all those iconic cinematic style images on…

— Paul Walker

Pulls readers in with an ironic, breezy portrait of sinister high school competitiveness. Deft and extraordinarily accomplished.

— Michael Cadnum

I often concentrate on the eyes and lips, they are great indicators of mood and feeling, and I find that I can…

— Robert Ryan

Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as…

— Edgar Degas

Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects…

— Pedro Almodovar

Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren't meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I…

— Cindy Sherman

Life is a series of family photos in which you keep moving to the rear until finally you're a portrait in the…

— Robert Breault

When people ask me which is your favourite portrait, they expect it to be Diana, or someone famous. But the answer is…

— Patrick Demarchelier

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Georg Baselitz

Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare…

— Myla Goldberg

A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

As artists, are we quasi psychiatrists who mend the soul? Do we provide the consolations, escapes, and reassurances which enable us to…

— Russell Sherman

There are ways of angling the camera. I don't just use a tripod. The only time I did that was in '88…

— Nan Goldin

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

— David Cobley

The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature; and we are not certain that the…

— Thomas B. Macaulay

Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting -…

— John Derbyshire

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

— Charles Baudelaire

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

— Frida Kahlo

I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.

— Lucian Freud

I love my dog. Actually, the best portrait I did was of my dog.

— Patrick Demarchelier

You will never see a portrait of my love, for miracles are never seen.

— Steve Lawrence

That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.

— Walker Evans

[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?

— Queen Elizabeth II

Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

— Paul Auster

I want an exhibition one day, so I am doing portraits of rock stars. I paint from pictures in magazines.

— Fearne Cotton

Obviously a drawing of a person is not a real person, but a drawing of a line is a real line.

— Sol LeWitt

Frankly, it's embarrassing to have a house filled with giant portraits of yourself.

— Burt Reynolds

Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.

— Gertrude Atherton

Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.

— Dana Spiotta