Lucian Quotes

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.

Be grateful. By slaying you now, I spare you an eternity of torment.

Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.

The single greatest impediment to error prevention in the medical industry is that we punish people for making mistakes.

Now that I know what I want, I don't have to hold on to it quite so much.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.

The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.

It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious.

I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.

I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.

Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye.

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

The only way I could work properly was by using the absolute maximum of observation and concentration that I could possible muster.

Realize that true happiness lies within you.

A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.

The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn.

Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear moonbeams striking on the windows.

The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement

The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.

The happy think a lifetime short, but to the unhappy one night can be an eternity.

Dancing is as old as love.

My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.

Not every story has a happy ending, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth telling.

Everybody dies. Some just need a little help.

As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does

In dreams, through longings, we can see— All latent in the dust of gold These forests that perhaps could be— But that will never, ever, grow.

There is no happiness without tears, no life without death. Beware! I am going to make you cry.

The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.

The world is fleeting; all things pass away; Or is it we that pass and they that stay?

The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art

The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter

The lips are closed, for the dancer has plenty of other voices at his service.

The industry needs transforming. It’s for others to decide whether they want to get stuck in the past or whether they want to come on the journey.

How gracious are the gods in bestowing high positions; and how reluctant are they to insure them when given.

The effort only shifted me from the frying-pan into the fire.

Losing as much money as I can get hold of is an instant solution to my economic problems.

Poverty persuades a man to do and suffer everything that he may escape from it.

It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he [the artist] can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.

I work from the people that interest me, and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures, and I can work more freely when they are there.

I use the gallery as if it were a doctor. I come for ideas and help - to look at situations within painting, rather than paintings.

I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

Death is a mercy, and I have enough mercy to go around.

The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.

The wealth of the soul is the only true wealth.

If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.

I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.

I have a timetable, but no routine.