• Painting has nothing to do with illustration, it is in away its opposite...In a way it's purely by chance that something happens on the canvas...but while I'm painting, suddenly, out of the painting itself, in some way these forms and directions that I hadn't anticipated just appear. It is these that I call accidents...Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• I painted to be loved.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• I’m unable to stop; or I paint when I’m in love, perhaps, but it’s too late now, I’m too old.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• I should really live in the mountains, but it’s impossible to paint in the mountains, at any rate for me. I need the city; I need to know there are people around me strolling, arguing, fucking—living, and yet I go out very rarely; I stay here in my cage. But I know there are people around me and that is enough.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself. I think that all human actions are designed to seduce, to please.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• Even as old as I am, it doesn’t stop me from looking at men...as if anything might happen, as if life were about to start again; often when I go out in the evening I flirt as if I were only 50. We ought to be able to change our engines. This is the artist’s privilege—to be ageless. Passion keeps you young, and passion and liberty are so seductive. When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• My painting is a representation of life, my own life above all, which has been very difficult. So perhaps my painting is very violent, but this is natural to me.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• Flesh and meat are life! If I paint red meat as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful. I don’t think anyone has ever really understood that. Ham, pigs, tongues, sides of beef seen in the butcher’s window, all that death, I find it very beautiful. And it’s all for sale—how unbelievably surrealistic!
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• My painting is not violent; it’s life that is violent. I have endured physical violence, I have even had my teeth broken. Sexuality, human emotion, everyday life, personal humiliation - violence is part of human nature.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
  Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look for the suggestion of one image as it relates to another. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates. When I paint, I want to paint an image from my imagination, and this image is subsequently transformed.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later. That’s like life: it is so precious because death is always beckoning.
  Francis Bacon Quotes
• I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist or I'd draw a ram's head really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect spiderman.
  Jean Michel Basquiat Quotes
• I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.
  Jean Michel Basquiat Quotes
• Directing is really exciting. In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint.
  George Clooney Quotes
• If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means what does it mean to paint? and that voice will be silenced.
  Vincent van Gogh Quotes
• I want to use colours that complement each other, that cause each other to shine brilliantly, that complete each other like a man and a woman.
  Vincent van Gogh Quotes
• I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.
  Vincent van Gogh Quotes
• The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.
  Vincent van Gogh Quotes
• Those who work in a preconceived style, deliberately turning their backs on nature, miss the truth. An artist must recognize, when he is reasoning, that his picture is an artifice; but when he is painting, he should feel that he has copied nature. And even when he departs from nature, he must do it with the conviction that it is only to interpret her more fully.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
• I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
  Henri Matisse Quotes
• Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.
  Pablo Picasso Quotes
• Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No. Just as one can never learn how to paint.
  Pablo Picasso Quotes
• I don't say everything, but I paint everything.
  Pablo Picasso Quotes
• Everyone wants to understand art. Why don’t we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.
  Pablo Picasso Quotes
  
• I don’t paint nature, I am nature.
  Jackson Pollock Quotes
• When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
  Jackson Pollock Quotes
• On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.
  Jackson Pollock Quotes
• You paint the fucking thing. You are killing me! You are killing me! You are killing me!
  Jackson Pollock Quotes
• It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.
  Mark Rothko Quotes
• A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
  Mark Rothko Quotes
• Painting is a language for exchange of truths about needs.
  Mark Rothko Quotes
• I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting... Besides even when the subject is different, people want the same painting.
  Andy Warhol Quotes
• I find myself gravitating towards drama. It interests me. In the books I read, the paintings I like, it's always the darker stuff.
  Naomi Watts Quotes
• The fine art of painting, which is the bastard of alchemy, always has been always will be, a game. The rules of the game are quite simple: in a given arena, on as many psychic fronts as the talent allows, one must visually describe, the centre of the meaning of existense.
  Brett Whiteley Quotes
• The most fundamental reason one paints is in order to see.
  Brett Whiteley Quotes
• I hardly ever see my paintings around.I don’t have the faintest idea where halfof my life’s work is. Sometimes that worries me. We should have a museum specially built for retrospectives. It would be ten feet wide and a mile long, like a railway tunnel, and you could walk down someone’s life chronologically.
  Brett Whiteley Quotes