Alice Neel quotes:

I paint; I'm a woman but I don't paint china. The first time I got a canvas I felt free. Art is overreaction to life. I love these early drawings; they show my innocent beginnings in a small town. Life is a sentence -- you live it out. Maybe these portraits jump out at you too much. People like things that conform.

Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.

Cezanne said, 'I love to paint people who have grown old naturally in the country.' And I say I love to paint people who have been torn to shreds by the rat race in New York.

Nobody knows what makes good art. As an artist, when it happens, you're grateful, and then you get on with it.

I don't paint like a woman is supposed to paint. Thank God, art doesn't bother about things like that.

Lucky for me, as old as I am, I can still change.

I know all the theory of everything but when I paint I don't think of anything except the subject and me.

I thought you had to give up a lot for art, and you did. It required complete concentration. It also required that whatever money you had had to be put into art materials.

It's a privilege, you know, to paint and it takes up a lot of time and it means there's a lot of things you don't do. But still, with me, painting was more than a profession, it was also an obsession. I had to paint.

I do not pose my sitters. I do not deliberate and then concoct... Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing - what the world has done to them and their retaliation.

Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom.

You should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is, because this is all part of experience, and the more experience you have, the better it is...unless it kills you, and then you know you have gone too far.

All experience is great providing you live through it. If it kills you, you've gone too far.

Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.

You know it's very hard to maintain a theory in the face of life that comes crashing about you.

You can't leave humanity out. If you didn't have humanity, you wouldn't have anything.

The minute I sat in front of a canvas I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do what I liked in it.

When women finally get liberated, they'll do the same that men do--dog eat dog-- that's what our culture is.... Not cooperation but assassination. Women will cooperate until they attain certain goals. Then one will begin to destroy the other.

If you're sufficiently tenacious and interested, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish in this world.

The place where I had freedom most was when I painted. I was completely and utterly myself.

When women finally get liberated, they'll do the same that men do - dog eat dog - that's what our culture is...

When I was in my studio I didn't give a damn what sex I was... I thought art is art.