Francis Bacon Quotes

In my case all painting… is an accident. I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.

You see, painting has now become, or all art has now become completely a game, by which man distracts himself. What is fascinating actually is, that it’s going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to become any good at all.

I believe in deeply ordered chaos.

It’s always hopeless to talk about painting – one never does anything but talk around it.

Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence – a reconcentration… tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time.

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love.

If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.

I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being.

I don’t believe art is available; it’s rare and curious and should be completely isolated; one is more aware of its magic the more it is isolated.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. 

The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance – if it is not irrational, you make illustration.

Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.

If my people look as if they’re in a dreadful fix, it’s because I can’t get them out of a technical dilemma.

I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.

As you work, the mood grows on you. There are certain images which suddenly get hold of me and I really want to do them. But it’s true to say that the excitement and possibilities are in the working and obviously can only come in the working.