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. – Matthew Modine
When you don’t have access to a subject, and all you have is ex-members and critics, there is this gravitational pull toward telling a certain version of events. Scientology would say this, and they have a point, that it’s like doing a portrait of a marriage in which you’re only hearing from the ex-wife and not the ex-husband. – Louis Theroux
I wanted to become a cartoon artist, a portrait artist, and an illustrator. This was my first idea. – Karl Lagerfeld
What I do feel is that ‘Up in the Air’ is the most indicative film of 2009. It is the portrait of 2009. – Jason Reitman
The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions. – Marcus Tullius Cicero
Not only are Christians writing about Jesus, but also Communists, Jews, atheists and agnostics are taking up their pens to paint a portrait of Jesus. – John Clayton
I would hardly call myself an artist in that sense; I doodle, I draw, I’m not a trained artist, I couldn’t sit down and do an accurate portrait of anyone. – Rene Auberjonois
The dog is the perfect portrait subject. He doesn’t pose. He isn’t aware of the camera. – Patrick Demarchelier
I first thought about doing a project about Anna Wintour and ‘Vogue’ when I read an article in ‘New York Magazine’ about the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Ball, the annual fundraising gala that Anna oversees. It created such a fascinating portrait that I couldn’t help but be compelled. – R. J. Cutler
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks. – Richard Avedon
We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in. – Pamela Hansford Johnson
I’m a portrait photographer that’s used to shooting celebrities, and I usually need time and all kinds of lights and a studio to set up my shots. – Platon
There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama’s Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists’ Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration. – Thomas Frank
Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That’s the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart. – Twyla Tharp
I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There’s not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that’s shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them. – Spike Jonze
My films are never about what Hong Kong is like, or anything approaching a realistic portrait, but what I think about Hong Kong and what I want it to be. – Wong Kar-wai
I kept wanting to push my image as validity; I wanted to see my portrait on a wall and know it was okay. – Toyin Odutola
‘The Portrait of Dorian Grey’ beautifully articulates how the altruistic part of ourselves clashes with our essentially narcissistic state. – Walton Goggins
I’m very particular who I work with. I’m not interested in portraying women with a cliched, generic look. I’m interested in a model who I can take a portrait of. – Tim Walker
Mehmet was the first sultan, and one of the first Muslims anywhere, to defy religious tradition by allowing his portrait to be made. – Stephen Kinzer