Top 95 Portrait Quotes

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a portrait painter. As I got to be older, I realized that as a portrait painter I wouldn’t be able to support a goldfish.

Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin’s granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine – oil on canvas – in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother’s house.

Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts – a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff – but we certainly don’t think of them adding up over time to some larger portrait of our times.

In art, there is no need for color; I see only light and shade. Give me a crayon, and I will paint your portrait.

I’m related to the portrait painter George Romney.

For all of her influence on popular culture, and the remarkable performances she left behind, perhaps Farrah Fawcett’s greatest legacy was her raw, intimate, honest portrait of a woman fighting for her life – against cancer.

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.

A true portrait should, today and a hundred years from today, the Testimony of how this person looked and what kind of human being he was.

I’ve always had a healthy disregard for authority – it allows me to do my job as a portrait photographer and not as someone who is playing the power game.

My films are never about what Hong Kong is like, or anything approaching a realistic portrait, but what I think about Hong Kong and what I want it to be.

Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show to the world… Every so often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

When you see Pep on TV or read his words in the newspaper, it is the portrait of a man who is the ultimate professional. But when you work with him, you don’t just come to see him as a coach. You learn about his qualities as a man. It is that side of Pep Guardiola that the people on the outside don’t get to see.

The photograph of the Queen sitting stiffly across the table from Glasgow resident Susan McCarron is so natural and expressive that it looks utterly fake. It looks like an artist’s portrait, complete with symbolism, humour and poignancy. No wonder the palace and the press have interpreted it in such different ways.

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.

I’ve started to see records as just a snapshot, a portrait of where you were at at that time. And if you’re comfortable with that, sometimes it’s like an old high school year book picture – it makes you blush a little bit, but you gotta learn to really appreciate each stage of your life and where you’re at.

The Trump campaign generally does not respond at all to my requests for information – either requests for broader data on Trump’s charitable giving or narrow requests for information about specific subjects, like the $20,000 portrait of himself that Trump seems to have purchased with money from his charity.

We hear a lot in this country about family, and ‘American Family’ just shows us a portrait we haven’t seen as much of yet. ‘American Family’ lets us know that being American isn’t about the color of your hair or eyes or skin: it’s really a state of mind.

My responsibility isn’t to paint a flattering portrait; my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait.

From inside where I live, I feel like I just perceive events in a certain rational way. I often find it sad or poignant, and it may not make me laugh a bit. But I don’t mind inventing a portrait that allows others to laugh if that’s what they want to do.

Since Obama has expressed admiration for the portrait of Abraham Lincoln that Doris Kearns Goodwin paints in ‘Team of Rivals,’ he could do the 16th president one better: He should name Hillary Clinton as his running mate in 2012. That would be both needed change and audacious.

I have a portrait of Saint Thomas More in my office.

Trump may not like the fact that 20-plus anonymous sources provided the ‘Times’ with an unflattering portrait of his campaign, but that doesn’t make it ‘false.’ Of course, Trump had no problem with news outlets running with his made-up claim in 2011 that President Obama ‘doesn’t have a birth certificate.’

A few weeks ago I went to a screening of ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ at Utopia. I’m not a very introspective person but when I get on that stage, it feels even more overwhelming than showing my films at the Cannes film festival. Because standing there, I’m so close to my past. I can see how far I’ve come.

At around 16, I became obsessed with James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. I was absorbed by the sense of someone trying to break out of an institution but then became interested in Joyces experimental way of writing.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I’m searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

Your library is your portrait.

I’ve jokingly painted some of my favorite collectors as black men, so there’s a really great portrait of David LaChapelle, the photographer – my version of him – that’s in his collection.

At the unveiling at the White House of the presidential portrait, President Bush pointed out that Hillary Clinton was the first sitting Senator in history to have her portrait hanging in the White House.

There are a lot of recurring themes that I resonated with when I read ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’

Just in the last week of his life, you could have seen him at Walgreens or at the Electric Fetus, where he often shopped for records – an astonishing sight, like the Mona Lisa taking in her own portrait at the Louvre. Prince, paradoxically, was reclusive but always around.

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people – and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

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.

Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That’s the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart.

Whenever I do someone’s portrait, I’m trying to locate the photo in the lens while reaching into that person psychologically. There’s the magic! I don’t always achieve it. It’s a hit or a miss!

‘The Red’ delivers intense action, leavened by a genuinely sympathetic portrait of soldiers caught up in battles they never chose.

In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She’s a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy.

You know, if one paints someone’s portrait, one should not know him if possible.

It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.

When I take a black-and-white portrait, it’s not particularly meant to please you. It’s meant to talk to you; it’s meant to shame you. It’s meant to scream out at you, and it has a message.

It is done… the precious portrait placed in the hands of the gentlemen for safe keeping.

I know Juffure was a British trading post and my portrait of the village bears no resemblance to the way it was. But the portrait I gave was true of nearly all the other villages in Gambia. I, we, need a place called Eden. My people need Pilgrim’s Rock.

My first song was called ‘Portrait.’ It would just be poetry, and I really never understood how to write the structure of writing a song. I just knew the feeling, and I knew it was supposed to break and change at the same part, so that’s how I write music.

Everyone sees something different in ‘Endgame’: a biblical apocalypse, a portrait of painful co-dependency, a confession of guilt and dignity in the face of death, a night of baffling hopelessness, a meaningless babble. Each interpretation reveals an absurd truth – not about the play, but about the person watching it.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

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 do think the past changes at a slower rate. It sits a little more still for its portrait.

My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn’t very expensive, I guess, because they don’t know if it’s a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who’ve owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that’s the earliest.