Norman Rockwell Quotes

When you're playing Marilyn Monroe, you have a responsibility to look and sound like her that you don't when you're playing people who weren't ever in the public eye.

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

Even if you're drawing a cartoon and exaggerating, you want to capture something true about the person.

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

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

I guess you should approach the roles differently when they're actual people who have been, this is the difference. Getting the accent exact, or the hair exact is less important in a situation like this.

I think every role you take on, you should take on the responsibility of doing the best representation of that person or that character or that role. When it is a human being that has actually existed, and it is a person that people know of, yeah, you feel an even more amount of pressure to do a good job.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

I think, first of all, every time you want to play somebody who is real is always challenging and always scary, because you are given a responsibility of someone's real life.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

That's what I paint, I paint people. They're portraits, but you won't always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you're buying it, and it's of your kid!

Washington could not tell a lie; Nixon could not tell the truth; Reagan cannot tell the difference.

I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.

He [Dewey] looks like the little man on the wedding cake.

Stick to the truth, avoid exaggeration.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

Anything in which you're playing someone real does make you feel responsible for making the story as true as it can be.

I think, for an artist, when you're drawing somebody who actually exists, it's a much steeper critical curve, as there is an actual representation of that person out there. You can't just interpret it any way you want.

The Big Lie: Hitler Invented It. Stalin Perfected It. Nixon Uses It.

Nixon's pretense was to be less than he was—less thoughtful, less introverted, less skeptical and analytical, less cerebral—to present himself deliberately as an Average American: patriotic, conventionally religious and responsible, gregarious, sports-loving, hardworking and hard-nosed.

Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree and then mount the stump to make a speech for conservation.

I never thought I would see a President of the United States say on television that “I am not a crook.” The worst part of it was, Nixon couldn’t even look the camera in the eye.

Some people will say that words like ‘scum’ and ‘rotten’ are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Sometimes I wish I had never pardoned that son of a bitch!