David Hockney Quotes

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's no doubt you smoke to calm yourself. I know I do. That's my decision about how I keep calm. I prefer that to Prozac. In fact I think it's healthier. I couldn't go to another New York party where they're all drinking water and on Prozac and telling you off for smoking.

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?"

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's a hierarchy. Why do I pick out that thing, that thing, that thing?

I'm aware it's now a hostile city [New York City]. I feel I'm in school, actually. There are signs everywhere you don't get in any other city. When you see all the smokers outside a building in New York, I just think the building is full of bad-mannered people who haven't thought, "We'll give them a little room to smoke in." That's what a reasonable person, a person with good manners, would do.

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

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

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.

He [Hockney's father] hardly ever left Bradford. He was a member of CND and a socialist with a rather romantic and naive idea of what Soviet Russia was like, all cornfields and ballet. He would have gone mad for email because he was always sending letters to world leaders — Eisenhower, Mao, Stalin — telling them what was what. I think he imagined the Politburo would hold up his letter and say, "Hold everything, Kenneth Hockney has written again!"

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

When conventions are old, there's quite a good reason, it's not arbitrary. So Picasso discovered that, as it were, and I'm sure that for him that was probably almost as exciting as discovering Cubism, rediscovering conventions of ordinary appearance, one-point perspective or something. The purists think you're going backwards, but I know you'd go forward. Future art that is based on appearances won't look like the art that's gone before. Even revivals of a period are not the same. The Renaissance is not the same as ancient Greece; the Gothic revival is not the same as Gothic. It might look like that at first, but you can tell it's not. 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.

I usually only draw myself in down periods. I do, actually. I suppose that's why I often draw myself looking grim. I just think, "Let's have a look in the mirror." When you are alone and you look in a mirror you never put on a pleasing smile. Well, you don't, do you?

What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw.

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look.

I've started painting much more freely, and faster. I think it's working in the theatre that did it. You know what the Glyndebourne scene-painters said about my The Magic Flute? They said they had to wear sunglasses to paint it.