Quotes from Lucian Freud

I want paint to work as flesh.

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

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't.

And, since the model he faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.

Since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture... it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.

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.

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

Whether it will convince or not, depends entirely on what it is in itself, what is there to be seen.

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.

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

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.

When I'm painting people in clothes I'm always thinking very much of naked people, or animals dressed.

An artist should appear in his work no more than God in nature. The man is nothing; the work is everything.

There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

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

I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.

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

The picture is all he feels about it, all he thinks worth preserving of it, all he invests it with. If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.

I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.

I have a hatred of habit and routine. And what dogs love is just that. They like regular everything, and I don't have regular anything. I have a timetable, but no routine.

You ask why I'm fascinated by the human figure? As a human animal, I am interested in some of my fellow animals: in their minds and bodies.

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

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