David Hockney Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.

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

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

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

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

People tell me they open my e-mails first, because they aren't demands and you don't need to reply. They're simply for pleasure.

I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.

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

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

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

To me, the world's rather beautiful if you look at it. Especially nature.

West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.

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.

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

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!'

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

I'm a bit claustrophobic, I don't like crowds, I live by the sea - that's what I see when I come out of my house in Bridlington.

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

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

Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?

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.

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

When you stop doing something, it doesn't mean you are rejecting the previous work. That's the mistake; it's not rejecting it, it's saying, 'I have exploited it enough now and I wish to take a look at another corner.'

I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium.

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

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

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

Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!

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

All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.

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

As for the world of fashion and celebrity, I have the usual interest in the human comedy, but the problems of depiction absorb me more.

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

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

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

I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really.

I'm not really looking for theater work. But if somebody approaches me with enthusiasm, I might respond.

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.

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.

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.

You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.

I'm very attracted to the great open spaces of the West.

Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?

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

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

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

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

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

I think I am seeing more clearly now than ever,

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

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

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

I paint what I like, when I like and where I like.

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

Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill.

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.

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?

But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you've taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn't.

I see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay.

I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time.

A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.

All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.

I did come from a pretty independent-minded family.

I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.

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

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

I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.

It's no good saying I wished I could go out more, because I can't. But I don't bother about it too much.

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.

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

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

Well, in Bradford I could say I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood

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.

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 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.

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.

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

I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure...ther e is always, everywhere, an enormous amount of suffering. But I believe my duty as an artist is to overcome and alleviate the sterility of despair...New ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling... I do believe that painting can change the world.

Perspective is a law of optics... The Chinese did not have a system like it. Indeed, it is said they rejected the idea of the vanishing point in the eleventh century, because it meant the viewer was not there, indeed, had no movement, therefore was not alive.

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!

I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look

The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be.

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.

There would be no bohemia without smoking.

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

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.