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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.
  • Said in conversation with Robert Hughes and quoted in Hughes' Lucian Freud: Paintings (1987) ISBN 0-500-27535-1, p.14

• My colour has no symbolic function whatever. I don't want any colour to be noticeable. I want the colour to be the colour of life, so that you would notice it as being irregular if it changed. I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent. I don't want people to say, "Oh, what was that red or that blue picture of yours, I've forgotten what it was."
  • Lucian Freud: Paintings (1987), p. 16

• 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), p. 20

• 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), p. 20

• URGENT SUBTLE CONCISE ROBUST
  • Words cited by Hughes as written by Freud on a wall in his studio.
  • Lucian Freud: Paintings (1987), p. 22

• I paint people not because of what they are like... but how they happen to be.
  • "A Queen of many colours," interview with Martin Gayford, Daily Telegraph, (2006-04-20), p. 3