David Hockney Quotes

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

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.

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

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

The moment you can learn to deal with homosexuality in art, it's quite an exciting moment, just as in a sense when people 'come out' it's quite an exciting moment. It means they become aware of their desires, and can deal with them in a remarkably honest way.

I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.

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

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

I'm convinced that technology and art go together - and always have, for centuries.

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

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.

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

You can't believe any picture nowadays, if it's digital. You can't really believe. If you see me shaking hands with Mr. [Barack] Obama, it doesn't mean I ever met him, does it?

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

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?

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.

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.

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

I've never been interested in, much in the politics of the art world, it doesn't interest me.

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

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.'

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

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

I've realized that I can do performances.

...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

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

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

You must plan to be spontaneous.

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

There's no-one up there in Northern Norway, food's terrible, but it's very, very beautiful to look at, if you've got eyes, and enjoy looking.

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

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

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

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.

It takes a long time to make it simple.

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