David Hockney Quotes

Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about, he thought of them as working drawings. I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there. And then when you come to use line, if you know what you're looking at, it's much easier to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution to what you want to depict.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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

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.

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.

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.

Interviewer: Love is certainly at the center of tolerance. They're intertwined, in a certain way. It helps you appreciate difference.
Hockney: Yes. And that's probably why I do portraits. Everybody's different; they look different, and are different. Maybe deep, deep down we're all the same. But on the surface we seem to be different, don't we?

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?

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.

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

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.