Since Obama has expressed admiration for the portrait of Abraham Lincoln that Doris Kearns Goodwin paints in 'Team of Rivals,' he could do the 16th president one better: He should name Hillary Clinton as his running mate in 2012. That would be both needed change and audacious.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

I love going to galleries, particularly the National Portrait Gallery.

I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that's shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.

The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.

So, did I work with Warhol? I worked with him less on that play then I did on other things. He actually did a portrait of my rabbit and some other stuff. Warhol was definitely... Warhol.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

Whenever I do someone's portrait, I'm trying to locate the photo in the lens while reaching into that person psychologically. There's the magic! I don't always achieve it. It's a hit or a miss!

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.

What I find really interesting is, whenever you see the person who gives you the portrait of yourself, the portrait seems to be a combination of their face and your face.

Walking down the street with a portrait of the Dalai Lama will get one immediately arrested in most parts of China. Tiny medallions are routinely confiscated and destroyed.

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.

'Cunnamulla' is a beautifully bleak portrait of a lonely town in which people are leading lives of sort of quiet desperation.

I kept wanting to push my image as validity; I wanted to see my portrait on a wall and know it was okay.