David Hockney Quotes

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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!'

All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.

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

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

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

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

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

I can see that cinema seems to be finished. Everybody has a bigger screen at home. I'm assuming eventually you won't need a screen at all - these iPhones will just project.

Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.

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

Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!

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

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.

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.

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.

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. I want it to be exciting all the time, and I get it, actually. On the other hand, I can find excitement, I admit, in raindrops falling on a puddle and a lot of people wouldn’t. I intend to have it exciting until the day I fall over.

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

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

I don't value prizes of any sort.

I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography. It's a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?

The editing of moving pictures is geared toward the single image. You'd have to edit things in new ways.

You always need a bit of low-tech.You always need a pair of scissors, it seems to me. You can do better things.... The high-tech, somehow, you do have to combine it with low-tech things.

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

There's no need to believe what an artist says. Believe what he does; that's what counts.

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 we're in a very exciting time - visually, I think we are. I've not got a crystal ball. I'm not saying I know what the future is at all. In some ways I'm getting quite pessimistic about the future, but in other ways I think it might get better. We are moving into very big changes.

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.

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

If you like music you like silence actually.

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

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

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

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

I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Now, I admit, there are not too many people who would find that exciting. But I would. And I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.

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

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

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.

What the art historians had forgotten is that in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Indian art, they never painted shadows. Why did they paint shadows in European art? Shadows are because of optics. Optics need shadows and strong light. Strong light makes the deepest shadows. It took me a few years to realize fully that the art historians didn't grasp that. There are a lot of interesting new things, ideas, pictures.

Tragedy is a literary concept.