David Hockney Quotes

I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.

What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.

If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive.

Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.

Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.

In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.

California is always in my mind.

I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.

I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money - I think that can be a burden - I’m greedy for an exciting life.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.

Just because I’m cheeky, doesn’t mean I’m not serious

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.

The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.

Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want.

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

Photoshop came out of painting, and now it's going back to painting.

There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look

I'm interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don't draw very well can't do that.

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.

East Yorkshire, to the uninitiated, just looks like a lot of little hills. But it does have these marvelous valleys that were caused by glaciers, not rivers. So it is unusual.

Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.

You must plan to be spontaneous.

Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.

It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it.

And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.

I've always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.

Drawing takes time. A line has time in it

It takes a long time to make it simple.

I've always been a looker. Loads of people say, "I never saw that" - but that's what artists do.

People from the village come up and tease me: 'We hear you've started drawing on your telephone.' And I tell them, 'Well, no, actually, it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad,'

Future art that is based on appearances won't look like the art that's gone before. Even revivals of a period are not the same.

OH, I LIKE smoking, I do. I smoke for my health, my mental health. Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life. I don't suppose anyone smoking a pipe would have road rage, would they?

There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art.

I'm a very early riser, and I don't like to miss that beautiful early morning light.

In fact, most artists want to make things a bit more difficult for themselves as they go along, to challenge themselves.

I do do a lot of talking, because it saves me listening.

But, I would always be thinking of how pictures are constructed and colour, how to use it, I mean you're using it for constructing, makes you think about it, the place did as well.

The only people who need degrees are dentists and brain surgeons.

It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.