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I always felt that my work hadn't much to do with art; my admirations for other art had very little room to show themselves in my work because I hoped that if I concentrated enough the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures. I ignored the fact that art, after all, derives from art. Now I realize that this is the case.

— Lucian Freud Lucian Freud : Paintings (1987)

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More quotes by Lucian Freud

I am only interested in painting the actual person; in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.

Lucian Freud : Paintings (1987)

I paint people not because of what they are like... but how they happen to be.

When I look at a body I know it gives me choices of what to put in a painting; what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

Lucian Freud : Paintings (1987)

I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen … that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

Words cited by Hughes as written by Freud on a wall in his studio, p. 22

Lucian Freud : Paintings (1987)

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