Francis Bacon Quotes

3 Quotes from Artist FRANCIS BACON from David Sylvester's "Interviews with Francis Bacon":

"I think I'm one of those people who have a gift for always getting by somehow. Even if it's a case of stealing or something like that. I don't feel any moral thing against it. I suppose that's an extremely egocentric attitude. It would be a nuisance to be caught and put in prison, but I don't have any feeling about stealing. Now that I earn money, it would be a kind of a stupid luxury to go out and steal. But when I had no money, I think I often used to take what I could get."

"I think I even might make a film; I might make a film of all the images which have crowded into my brain, which I remember and haven't used. After all, most of my paintings are to do with images. I never look at a painting, hardly. If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently. I might make a film, but that would be even more complicated because I wouldn't be able ever to find the image which I can make with my painting."

"...If you are going to decide to be a painter, you have got to decide that you are not going to be afraid of making a fool of yourself. I think another thing is to be able to find subjects which really absorb you to try and do. I feel that without a subject you automatically go back into decoration because you haven't got the subject which is always eating into you to bring it back - and the greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation. "