David Hockney Quotes

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?

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?"

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.

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.

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.

The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway — it is called medication.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look.

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?

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

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