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"My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings."
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"If you need an alarm clock, you need a new job."

"Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do."

"A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth."

"Ruth Cole was a novelist, novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing."

"Speaking about work isn't working."

"The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary."

"All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work."
Explore more quotes by Lucian Freud

"As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does."

"Since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture... it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model."

"The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement."

"A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure."

"I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."

"I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them."

"I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do."

"A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art."
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