Portraits Quotes - Page 11

• 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.

  Douglas Wilder

  Running, Team, Names

  "Obama-Clinton ticket for 2012" by Douglas Wilder, www.politico.com. August 2, 2010.

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• I happened to take a photo, and there was my wife, my dog and my banjo, all in the same shot - and I thought, "Oh, that's like a family portrait right there."

  Steve Martin

  Dog, Wife, Banjos

  Source: www.cnn.com

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• Krys Lee has written a book of unforgettable stories, each one building on the other to create a complex, moving portrait of contemporary Korea and its diaspora. She guides us surely through the fallout of war, immigration, and financial crisis, always alert to the possibility of tenderness, transcendence, and even humor along the way. Lee is a writer who really understands loneliness, but her voice is so appealing, and her perceptions so wise, that we feel all the less lonely for knowing her characters and experiencing their lives.

  Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Wise, Lonely, War

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• I do portraits. I usually do live models in a class environment, but I've been painting at home more. I really love the human form, and I love faces. I've tried to do landscapes a few times.

  Michelle Pfeiffer

  Home, Class, Landscape

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• A filmmaker should never assume he's superior to his subject. I often find that even the simplest topic remains an enigma. The best film portraits not only evoke that enigma but ingest it in a process that renders what's invisible visible.

  Damian Pettigrew

  Topics, Assuming, Film

  Le Parisien, May, 2003.

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• I thank Henry James for the scene in the hotel room, that I stole from Portrait Of A Lady… This particular scene is the most beautiful scene ever written.

  Leos Carax

  Beautiful, Rooms, Scene

  "New York Film Festival - diary four" by Anne-Katrin Titze, www.eyeforfilm.co.uk. October 11, 2012.

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• My favorite books have a personality and complexion as distinctly drawn as if the author's portrait were framed into the paragraphs and smiled upon me as I read his illustrated pages.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Book, Personality, Pages

  Amos Bronson Alcott (1872). “Concord Days”, p.133

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• A vivid portrait of a teenage girl and her family in disarray. Meredith is a wonderful narrator, witty, feisty, full of yearning, and the story she tells is as complicated as life itself. This is a richly satisfying novel.

  Margot Livesey

  Girl, Witty, Teenage

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• Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century.

  Yasumasa Morimura

  Photography, Self, Doe

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• What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

  August Wilhelm von Schlegel

  Art, Portraiture, Painting

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• (Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Cities, Canada, Toronto

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• Winckelmann wished to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Art, Reflection, Years

  Robert Aris WILLMOTT (1851). “Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature”, p.91

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

  Gertrude Atherton

  Thieves, Hamilton, Painter

  Gertrude Atherton (1902). “The Conqueror: Being the True and Romantic Story of Alexander Hamilton”, G.N. Morang

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• I paint; I'm a woman but I don't paint china. The first time I got a canvas I felt free. Art is overreaction to life. I love these early drawings; they show my innocent beginnings in a small town. Life is a sentence -- you live it out. Maybe these portraits jump out at you too much. People like things that conform.

  Alice Neel

  Art, Drawing, People

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• If we could know as intimately as we know our more immediate parents the long line of ancestors through whom the family spirit has passed on its way to us, we should probably become fatalists in face of the apparently overwhelming evidence that there is nothing in us that has not come to us from, or at least through, the Family. Family portrait galleries are a striking confirmation of the persistence of characteristics which ultimately govern the fortunes of successive generations.

  Helen Bosanquet

  Persistence, Long, Parent

  Helen Bosanquet, Bernard Bosanquet (1996). “Helen and Bernard Bosanquet: Works on economics & social welfare: the philosophy of the state and the practice of welfare”

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• I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.

  Harold Bloom

  Believe, Book, Self

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• Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to neither; it is a brave, original book.

  Myla Goldberg

  Book, Brave, Notable

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• The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once said: In a Democracy, portraits of a nation's leader should never exceed the size of a postage stamp. That won't happen so quickly in Russia.

  Vladimir Sorokin

  Russia, Leader, Democracy

  "Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire". Interview with Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp, www.spiegel.de. February 2, 2007.

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• I wonder whether there is such a thing as critical art. I suppose there are portraits of people who could destroy you.

  John Currin

  Art, People, Wonder

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Art, Government, Freedom Of Speech

  Interview with Alvin Toffler, reprints.longform.org. January 1964.

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• Being a digital photographer I'm in awe of the older generation of photographers who created all those iconic cinematic style images on film, such as Man Ray's portrait of the photographer Lee Miller.

  Paul Walker

  Men, Style, Digital

  Source: claphamstudiohire.com

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• I used to paint and I used to draw, and I probably would have loved to have been a portrait painter if I'd been good enough, but I really wasn't good enough.

  Sarah Ruhl

  Good Enough, Paint, Used

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• With Jane Birkin, we had a scene from a film called Jane B. by Agnès V. - a portrait I made in '87. We had a casino scene, surrealistic, in which we had some naked people gambling. Jane Birkin was the card dealer and I was the player. I had beautiful jewelery around me, and when I lost I would take the jewelery and say, Service - being very generous, because it was very expensive jewelery. I would say, Tip.

  Agnes Varda

  Beautiful, Player, Gambling

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. October 1, 2009.

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• Every interview is as much an impression of the journalist as it is the artist or subject. You look at interviews and you see a portrait of two people. The worst thing that can happen is if you're misquoted and then that quote is misquoted. That does drive one crazy. The most embarrassing thing is when your words are misrepresented or sometimes you say something stupid and you live to regret it.

  Antony Hegarty

  Regret, Crazy, Stupid

  Source: thequietus.com

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• I was shooting lots of large format portraits then but I've since changed to digital, where you have so much more control. There are millions of things you can do with digital; you can be more spontaneous, and you're more in control of your color palette.

  Gregory Heisler

  Color, Shooting, Digital

  Source: aphotoeditor.com

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