Lucian Freud Quotes

Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.

'M Train' is as close to knowing what I'm like as anything. I don't know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

I don't think I've ever written about me. I'm not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women.

Listen to what people say about themselves; they will tell you everything you need to know.

It is difficult to know oneself, but it isn't easy to paint oneself either.

As I don't consider myself exceptional, but simply a storyteller, each of my stories is really a period of my life. Deep down I feel that criticism of my work-which is the most sincere and authentic vision of myself-is unsuitable and immodest, whether it is favorable or unfavorable.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

I made the character as much of myself as I could.

My work looks like a comic book in form, but it's not a typical comic book in content. I write autobiographical stuff.

I think I'd say that my whole body of work is a reflection of who I am, but not any one specific thing.

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

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

There is no self-portrait of me.

All of my films have been autobiographical - it's all I've got to go on.

Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling.

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.

It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity.

I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.

Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.

I'm not interested in someone's credits. Let me see who you are, and tell me a story of your life.

I couldn't put into a capsule one thing that represents me, I don't think.