26 Quotes by Paula Rego

Poetry is good for unleashing images.

I'm not fashionable at all, and the fact that I manage to sell pictures without being fashionable is thanks to my gallery.

The gaps between the forms worry me. I can never get these spaces right...

I thought the only way you can get into things is... through the basement... exactly where my studio was ... I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me... where I could munch away at them.

We interpret the world through stories... everybody makes in their own way sense of things, but if you have stories it helps.

I get inspiration from things that have nothing to do with painting: caricature, items from newspapers, sights in the street, proverbs, nursery-rhymes, children's games and songs, nightmares, desires, terrors. ... That question [why do you paint?] has been put to me before and my answer was, 'To give terror a face.' But it's more than that. I paint because I can't help it.

To find one's way anywhere one has to find one's door, just like Alice, you see. You take too much of one thing and you get too big, then you take too much of another and you get too small. You've got to find your own doorway into things...

If you put frightening things into a picture, then they can't harm you. In fact, you end becoming quite fond of them.

Every change is a form of liberation. My mother used to say a change is always good even if it's for the worse.