Portrait Quotes

There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process.

Your library is your portrait.

It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.

I found it an interesting portrait of a marriage in exploring notions of how one partner supports the other, whilst not jeopardizing the greater good - which is the family.

The moment seemed right to me for a full and, if possible, authoritative portrait of the life and character of the Prince of Wales.

I would hardly call myself an artist in that sense; I doodle, I draw, I'm not a trained artist, I couldn't sit down and do an accurate portrait of anyone.

The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.

A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

When having my portrait painted I don't want justice, I want mercy.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.

When I was little, we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We'd play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He'd read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.

We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.

The true portrait of a man is a fusion of what he thinks he is, what others think he is, what he really is and what he tries to be.

Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities.

I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.

The length of exposure (one minute in sunlight) is still too long for the portrait. It was fifteen minutes when I first began my work. Progress may continue.

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

There's a discipline. When you take someone's portrait, you don't have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that's the image that you took.

My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.