Richard Prince Quotes

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

What you see is what you get. What you hear is who I am.

My photographs don't do me justice - they just look like me.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Dandyism is a lie which reveals the truth, and the truth is that we are what we pretend to be.

I'm not big into images. I'm into reality.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.

That is what politics is really about—reality and not image.

Generally, a lot of the things people think are made up are real, a lot of the things people think are real are made up, a lot of the things people think are spontaneous are cleverly faked, and a lot of the things people think are fake are spontaneous.

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real.

We are what we seem to be.

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over.

Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.