Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

A good portrait is incredibly hard to create, there is too much temptation to pander to the individual rather than portray them as they really were

I would not describe my personality. And I think when you describe people, you are making a mistake. That's not how they are; that's how you perceive them at that moment. It's limiting in front of something that is magnificent and unlimited: life.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

It's sad when you can't make everyone happy, though. It's impossible but, at the same time, you still hope. You think, 'Maybe I can do it,' but you know you can't. But gosh, if I had to rely on giving people what they wanted, I would have had to write 40 billion different books and even then, I wouldn't get it right.

It's hard for me to assess what I brought because each time you pick up a camera and point it at a person, you're trying to define that person so to talk generally is difficult because I have to think of a given image in order to conjure up what we're talking about.

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

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.

I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature.

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.

To anyone who has served in Washington, there is something oddly familiar about [having your portrait painted]. First, you're painted into a corner, then you're hung out to dry and, finally, you're framed.

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

I don't know if I can convey the postman as I feel him... Unfortunately he cannot pose, and a painting demands an intelligent model.

Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It's wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.

It is difficult to judge one's contemporaries; perhaps it is impossible to understand them.

I have a really strong suspicion of the romantic nature of portraiture, the idea that you're telling some essential truth about the interior lives of your subject.