Paula Rego Quotes

Art is the only place you can do what you like. That's freedom.

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

To be a dog woman is not necessarily to be downtrodden; that has very little to do with it. In these pictures every woman's a dog woman, not downtrodden, but powerful. To be bestial is good. It's physical. Eating, snarling, all activities to do with sensation are positive. To picture a woman as a dog is utterly believable.

Sketches always have more vitality than paintings because you're finding things out through doing 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.

Poetry is good for unleashing images.

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

Another thing that escapes me is HOW to give substance to the forms. One day they look solid and 'real' and they seem to hinge upon each other and splinter and creak, fall with a thud to the bottom of the canvas and drag across the surface, and the next day they are like dust, all lightweight and just stuck there.

That is why my pictures don't look like modern art. It's some sort of timidity on my part I'm sure.

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

In collage you're doing it in stages so you're not actually doing it right there. You first of all draw it on the paper, then you cut it up, then you paste it down, then you change it, then you shove it about, then you may paint bits of it over, so actually you're not making the picture there and then, you're making it through a process, so it's not so spontaneous.

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.