David Hockney Quotes

I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.

The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off.

Movie actors disappear - any young person wouldn't know Cary Grant. They're going to disappear. Fifty years ago, you thought film was here to stay. But nothing is here to stay, actually - except perhaps paintings and drawings.

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,'

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

I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.

Tragedy is a literary concept.

I'm really only interested in technology that is about pictures. I'm interested in anything that makes a picture.

The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough.

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

I avoid the public because the English public is too aggressive these days for me.

In my old age, I'll be in L.A.

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

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

The cameras are getting smaller, they're getting more versatile, and eventually, I'm sure you'll have a camera with lots and lots of things on it so you can alter the picture. You could alter perspective.

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!'

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

Like people, trees are all individuals.

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?

I thought the iPhone was great, but this takes it to a new level - simply because it's eight times the size of the iPhone, as big as a reasonably-sized sketchbook ... Anyone who likes drawing and mark-making will like to explore new media.

Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.

Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.

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.

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

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

Ultimately, I'm about liberty and I think you have to defend it.

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.

I did come from a pretty independent-minded family.

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.

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.

You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.

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

How can Blair fight a war on terror? Terror is not an ideology or an army; terror is a technique.

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.

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

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 value my friends.

I think my father would have liked to have been an artist, actually. But I think he didn't quite have perhaps the drive or, I don't know, I mean he had a family to bring up I suppose.

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 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.

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.

The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That's the real problem, the perspective picture.

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

Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model.

I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It's an interesting one and it's a permanent one; there's no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There's no set rule.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

In fact, I'm a bit of a slob, but I've always said my excuse, I have a higher sense of order, I can see it where others can't. That's my excuse for slobbery, I must admit, but I think it's a good one.

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

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.

On the iPhone I tended to draw with my thumb. Whereas the moment I got to the iPad, I found myself using every finger.

Any artist will tell you he's really only interested in the stuff he's doing now. He will, always. It's true, and it should be like that.

I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can't be done in one picture.

I generally only paint people I know, I'm not a flatterer really.

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

Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about ... I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there ... to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution ...

If you like music you like silence actually.

Anything simple always interests me.

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

The problem is, photographic dyes and printing inks aren't as good as paint, actually.

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

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.

Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it.

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

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.

Until I saw my drawings replayed on the iPad, I'd never seen myself draw. Someone watching me would be concentrating on the exact moment, but I'd always be thinking a little bit ahead. That's especially so in a drawing where you are limiting yourself, a line drawing for example. When you are doing them you are very tense, because you have to reduce everything to such simple terms.

The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway - it is called medication.

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

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

I'm a bit claustrophobic, I know that now.

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

I'm fed up with being bossed around.

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.

We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn't happen in music.

I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.

I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can't hear, you somehow see.

I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s.

I mean if you draw you like drawing, it's er, an activity you do all the time actually.

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

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

If you are not playful you are not alive.

The moment rules over everything.

I'm a bit of a propagandist.

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

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

I was 18 when I first visited London, I'm very provincial like that, but I must confess the moment I got to America I thought: This is the place. It was more open, with 24-hour cities and pubs and restaurants that didn't close.

We all know a mirror reflects us, if you look in it. If you move, the reflection moves. If you project from a mirror, meaning it will project an image, it's nothing to do with you. The world seen by nobody.

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.

On the 31st of October 2011 year, I had a mini-stroke. I couldn't finish my sentences. So I went to the doctor. It was a tiny one. The speech came back in a month or so. I did notice I could draw even better, I felt. I was concentrating more. And I wasn't talking much, but I was drawing. I said, "Well, I don't have to talk much."

I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet.

I go and see anything that's visually new, any technology that's about picture-making. The technology won't make the pictures different, but someone using it will.

It's difficult to talk about colour, even remember colour actually.

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.

Easel painting means small painting.

I've always wanted to be able to paint the dawn.

In one gallery they actually had a notice which said No Sketching. How obnoxious! I said, How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?

Britain is a very small country with a very large press.

California is always in my mind.

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

I'm a natural sceptic.