21 Quotes by Frank Auerbach

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

I destroy things every day in the act of working and often recall a picture I had considered finished in order to rework it.

It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint, considering that one may not wake up the following morning.

Ideally, one should have more material than one can possibly cope with.

Real style is not having a program - it's how one behaves in a crisis.

I'm hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.

The unity in any painter's work arises from the fact that a person, brought to a desperate situation, will behave in a certain way... style.

I don't think Seurat would have been aware of the dots - he would have been aware of what he was trying to do. The dots were an instrument.

I think that the very earliest influence was a horror of having to work in a bank or an office, a desire for a free and creative life.