David Hockney Quotes

How difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don't.

I feel 30. [Publo] Picasso said he always felt 30. Well, I do.

No one has ever asked to see my degree certificate.

Once you start painting, you could of course get lost. I mean you get out of yourself, you don't know whether you're thinking, you just act actually sometimes.

If you like music you like silence actually.

But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.

All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

With watercolour, you can't cover up the marks. There's the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well.

I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one.

I'm always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.

Nature, never, never let's you down, it's not a cliché, nature isn't a cliché, pictures might be, but you can get tired of pictures.

We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.

It's all one to me: opera, painting, drawing, faxes.

Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it.

Television is becoming a collage - there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.

An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always.

I was never that interested in movies. I was interested in them as a thing, but I didn't want to make movies. I always wanted to draw and paint.

I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that's it.

Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.

I did come from a pretty independent-minded family.

I can often tell when drawings are done from photographs, because you can tell what they miss out, what the camera misses out: usually weight and volume - there's a flatness to them.

Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.

Anything simple always interests me.

Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out.

Water colours are wet colours in water.

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.

I have got an iPad, what a joy! Van Gogh would have loved it, and he could have written his letters on it as well.

The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography.

It's all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops—for a split second.

Every good artist I know, I always think works hard, we're working all the time.

I never talk when I'm drawing a person, especially if I'm making line drawings. I prefer there to be no noise at all so I can concentrate more.

I worked in the NHS as a hospital orderly during my national service, and people thought it was a noble service. But over the years it's lost its humanity.

Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.

What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!'

If we are to change our world view, images have to change.

I think I am seeing more clearly now than ever.

No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and it has to be organized into shapes.

When you're very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom. It's quite exciting, and you're prepared to do anything.

Painting and drawing has been here for 35,000 years.

I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure. I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair.

Loads of people, particularly artists, hate pretty pictures. Now I've never met anyone who didn't like a pretty face.

I have never really done any teaching and maybe I should have done. I am not power-mad enough.

Paint something every day.

It's time to debate images, especially when someone's going to prison for downloading them.

I never work with music. I hate background music, always did. I only like music in the foreground, meaning, deliberately listen to it, actually.

The picture itself is a document. How do you mean? We're looking at a document. It gives you clues.

What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw.

The pictures on the walls aren't like movies. They don't move, they don't talk, and they'll last longer. They will last longer.