Few persons who have ever sat for a portrait can have felt anything but inferior while the process is going on.
I sort of feel that the role of a portrait in society is to represent the sitters, we see paintings of Shakespeare and we believe that it is what he looked like, well maybe a little older, fatter and with a higher hairline. I guess it would be cool if the portraits that were painted really did look like the sitter or expressed some sort of emotion that gave the viewers in the future a sense of the sitter's pathos at the time it was painted.
[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.
The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process.
A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.
There's a discipline. When you take someone's portrait, you don't have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that's the image that you took.
None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.
You shouldn't need 60 full minutes to create a portrait that an audience doesn't forget. You should be able to make an impression that's lasting and resonant with one scene.
My real father was a portrait painter. I went to a lot of auctions as a kid and galleries.
At the unveiling at the White House of the presidential portrait, President Bush pointed out that Hillary Clinton was the first sitting Senator in history to have her portrait hanging in the White House.
Through a portrait, we can potentially see everything — the history and depth of a person's life, as well as evidence of a primal universal presence. I have dedicated my life and creative energy to capturing these transcendent moments in which a connection is made between the subject, the photographer, and the viewer.
If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.
Jeff [Koons] called me because he'd seen a portrait of David Bowie, at the beginning of the 80s - I've known Jeff for a long time - and he said, Greg, I want to look like a high-profile celebrity, living on the edge. I think that says it all.
Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.
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.
I love my dog. Actually, the best portrait I did was of my dog.
[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?
A remarkably revealing portrait.
I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold.