David Hockney Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

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

In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.

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.

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

California is always in my mind.

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

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

About shadows: do we see shadows? Loads of people don't. A camera will notice a shadow, but how many people have got a shadow in front of them when they take a picture and don't notice it, and then they see it in the photograph because the photograph will catch the shadow.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Photoshop came out of painting, and now it's going back to painting.

...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.

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look

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.

Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.

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

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

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

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.

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

Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.

It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

You must plan to be spontaneous.

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.

Everything does come from nature. That's where you get new ideas. Just draw the landscape. I felt doing it with a bit of burnt wood was also good because I was drawing burnt wood with a piece of wood. I wanted to do black and white. After using color, I thought black and white would be good. You can have color in black and white. There is color in them, actually.

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

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

I've always been interested in space in pictures. I think my going deaf increased my spatial sense, because I can't get the direction of sound. I feel that I see space very clearly, and that's because I can't hear it. So it's a compensatory thing.

Drawing takes time. A line has time in it

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,'

It takes a long time to make it simple.

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