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Movie actors disappear - any young person wouldn't know Cary Grant. They're going to disappear. Fifty years ago, you thought film was here to stay. But nothing is here to stay, actually - except perhaps paintings and drawings. -- David Hockney
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.' -- David Hockney
I usually only draw myself in down periods ... 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? -- David Hockney
It's no good saying I wished I could go out more, because I can't. But I don't bother about it too much. -- David Hockney
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist. -- David Hockney
All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose. -- David Hockney
You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make. -- David Hockney
You always need a bit of low-tech.You always need a pair of scissors, it seems to me. You can do better things ... The high-tech, somehow, you do have to combine it with low-tech things. -- David Hockney
I never work with music. I hate background music, always did. I only like music in the foreground, meaning, deliberately listen to it, actually. -- David Hockney
Every good artist I know, I always think works hard, we're working all the time. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art. -- David Hockney
I'm not antisocial. I like people. -- David Hockney
I don't value prizes of any sort. -- David Hockney
I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning. -- David Hockney
I'm a bit of a propagandist. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
Just because I'm cheeky, doesn't mean I'm not serious -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough. -- David Hockney
I'm interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything. -- David Hockney
I think we're in a very exciting time - visually, I think we are. I've not got a crystal ball. I'm not saying I know what the future is at all. In some ways I'm getting quite pessimistic about the future, but in other ways I think it might get better. We are moving into very big changes. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always. -- David Hockney
Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life. -- David Hockney
Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it. -- David Hockney
I've always been a looker. Loads of people say, "I never saw that" - but that's what artists do. -- David Hockney
I was 18 when I first visited London, I'm very provincial like that, but I must confess the moment I got to America I thought: This is the place. It was more open, with 24-hour cities and pubs and restaurants that didn't close. -- David Hockney
I can see that cinema seems to be finished. Everybody has a bigger screen at home. I'm assuming eventually you won't need a screen at all - these iPhones will just project. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
We all know a mirror reflects us, if you look in it. If you move, the reflection moves. If you project from a mirror, meaning it will project an image, it's nothing to do with you. The world seen by nobody. -- David Hockney
In fact, I'm a bit of a slob, but I've always said my excuse, I have a higher sense of order, I can see it where others can't. That's my excuse for slobbery, I must admit, but I think it's a good one. -- David Hockney
It is difficult to say why I decided I wanted to be an artist. Obviously, I had some facility, more than other people, but sometimes facility comes because one is more interested in looking at things, examining them, more interested in the visual world than other people are. -- David Hockney
Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill. -- David Hockney
Dawn is about luminosity and so is the iPhone ... The little drawings of the dawn are done while I'm still in bed ... If you're in my kind of business you'd be a fool to sleep through that ... Artists can't work office hours, can they? -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
But, I would always be thinking of how pictures are constructed and colour, how to use it, I mean you're using it for constructing, makes you think about it, the place did as well. -- David Hockney
I go and see anything that's visually new, any technology that's about picture-making. The technology won't make the pictures different, but someone using it will. -- David Hockney
I do believe that painting can change the world. -- David Hockney
I'm rather shocked by what I thought was simple mindedness actually. I thought they're not looking, they're not actually looking. -- David Hockney
I'm always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
In fact, most artists want to make things a bit more difficult for themselves as they go along, to challenge themselves. -- David Hockney
You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative. -- David Hockney
The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years. -- David Hockney
OH, I LIKE smoking, I do. I smoke for my health, my mental health. Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life. I don't suppose anyone smoking a pipe would have road rage, would they? -- David Hockney
I thought the iPhone was great, but this takes it to a new level - simply because it's eight times the size of the iPhone, as big as a reasonably-sized sketchbook ... Anyone who likes drawing and mark-making will like to explore new media. -- David Hockney
The only people who need degrees are dentists and brain surgeons. -- David Hockney
Well, in Bradford I could say I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood. -- David Hockney
In my old age, I'll be in L.A. -- David Hockney
There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn't happen in music. -- David Hockney
I worked in the NHS as a hospital orderly during my national service, and people thought it was a noble service. But over the years it's lost its humanity. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus. -- David Hockney
Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out. -- David Hockney
As for the world of fashion and celebrity, I have the usual interest in the human comedy, but the problems of depiction absorb me more. -- David Hockney
It takes a long time to make it simple. -- David Hockney
I'm convinced that technology and art go together - and always have, for centuries. -- David Hockney
If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look ... and paint what you see until the canvas ends. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops. -- David Hockney
The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent. -- David Hockney
Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!' -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
It's difficult to talk about colour, even remember colour actually. -- David Hockney
I'm a bit claustrophobic, I don't like crowds, I live by the sea - that's what I see when I come out of my house in Bridlington. -- David Hockney
The lens is a tyranny. -- David Hockney
I'm a very early riser, and I don't like to miss that beautiful early morning light. -- David Hockney
Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model. -- David Hockney
It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it. -- David Hockney
I mean if you draw you like drawing, it's er, an activity you do all the time actually. -- David Hockney
I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time. -- David Hockney
You would think death was an optional extra nowadays. Nobody wants to tick that box. -- David Hockney
I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can't be done in one picture. -- David Hockney
I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really. -- David Hockney
I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s. -- David Hockney
I'm really only interested in technology that is about pictures. I'm interested in anything that makes a picture. -- David Hockney
I generally only paint people I know, I'm not a flatterer really. -- David Hockney
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? -- David Hockney
How can Blair fight a war on terror? Terror is not an ideology or an army; terror is a technique. -- David Hockney
The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors. -- David Hockney
People tell me they open my e-mails first, because they aren't demands and you don't need to reply. They're simply for pleasure. -- David Hockney
The pictures on the walls aren't like movies. They don't move, they don't talk, and they'll last longer. They will last longer. -- David Hockney
The problem is, photographic dyes and printing inks aren't as good as paint, actually. -- David Hockney
Ultimately, I'm about liberty and I think you have to defend it. -- David Hockney
Like people, trees are all individuals. -- David Hockney
I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It's an interesting one and it's a permanent one; there's no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There's no set rule. -- David Hockney
It's time to debate images, especially when someone's going to prison for downloading them. -- David Hockney
The 'how' has a great effect on what we see. To say that 'what we see' is more important than 'how we see it' is to think that 'how' has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that 'how' often affects 'what' we see. -- David Hockney
I have got an iPad, what a joy! Van Gogh would have loved it, and he could have written his letters on it as well. -- David Hockney
With watercolour, you can't cover up the marks. There's the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well. -- David Hockney
I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old. -- David Hockney
Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want. -- David Hockney
I live wherever I happen to be. -- David Hockney
I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can't hear, you somehow see. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
I paint what I like, when I like and where I like. -- David Hockney
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 ... I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there ... to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution ... -- David Hockney
I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography. It's a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that? -- David Hockney
I have never really done any teaching and maybe I should have done. I am not power-mad enough. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs. -- David Hockney
I've realized that I can do performances. -- David Hockney
The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it. -- David Hockney
Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away. -- David Hockney
On the iPhone I tended to draw with my thumb. Whereas the moment I got to the iPad, I found myself using every finger. -- David Hockney
Photoshop came out of painting, and now it's going back to painting. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny. -- David Hockney
Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world! -- David Hockney
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? -- David Hockney
If you are not playful you are not alive. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
The editing of moving pictures is geared toward the single image. You'd have to edit things in new ways. -- David Hockney
It's all one to me: opera, painting, drawing, faxes. -- David Hockney
Anything simple always interests me. -- David Hockney
Perspective is a law of optics ... The Chinese did not have a system like it. Indeed, it is said they rejected the idea of the vanishing point in the eleventh century, because it meant the viewer was not there, indeed, had no movement, therefore was not alive. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
I think I am seeing more clearly now than ever. -- David Hockney
Painting and drawing has been here for 35,000 years. -- David Hockney
Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting. -- David Hockney
The cameras are getting smaller, they're getting more versatile, and eventually, I'm sure you'll have a camera with lots and lots of things on it so you can alter the picture. You could alter perspective. -- David Hockney
Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don't draw very well can't do that. -- David Hockney
If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive. -- David Hockney
I never talk when I'm drawing a person, especially if I'm making line drawings. I prefer there to be no noise at all so I can concentrate more. -- David Hockney
If you like music you like silence actually. -- David Hockney
I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary. -- David Hockney
Easel painting means small painting. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
I can often tell when drawings are done from photographs, because you can tell what they miss out, what the camera misses out: usually weight and volume - there's a flatness to them. -- David Hockney
There are enough no smoking places now. -- David Hockney
Loads of people, particularly artists, hate pretty pictures. Now I've never met anyone who didn't like a pretty face. -- David Hockney
To me, the world's rather beautiful if you look at it. Especially nature. -- David Hockney
The picture itself is a document. How do you mean? We're looking at a document. It gives you clues. -- David Hockney
I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders. -- David Hockney
It's a myth that if you're liked by only four people it must be good. It might also be very bad: they might be your mother, your brother, your uncle and your aunt. -- David Hockney
I've always wanted to be able to paint the dawn. -- David Hockney
But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you've taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn't. -- David Hockney
Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second. -- David Hockney
I did come from a pretty independent-minded family. -- David Hockney
I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial. -- David Hockney
It's all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops - for a split second. -- David Hockney
West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things. -- David Hockney
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,' -- David Hockney
The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting. -- David Hockney
My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else. -- David Hockney
It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work. -- David Hockney
Tragedy is a literary concept. -- David Hockney
All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it? -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
I'm very attracted to the great open spaces of the West. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it. -- David Hockney
Britain is a very small country with a very large press. -- David Hockney
You must plan to be spontaneous. -- David Hockney
No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and it has to be organized into shapes ... -- David Hockney
I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that's it. -- David Hockney
I'm fed up with being bossed around. -- David Hockney
Spring is very energising to me. -- David Hockney
Water colours are wet colours in water. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it. -- David Hockney
I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world. -- David Hockney
Time is the great mystery anyway. And it's still the great mystery in the moving picture as well. -- David Hockney
I avoid the public because the English public is too aggressive these days for me. -- David Hockney
The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That's the real problem, the perspective picture. -- David Hockney
We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way. -- David Hockney
California is always in my mind. -- David Hockney
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light. -- David Hockney
I value my friends. -- David Hockney
I do do a lot of talking, because it saves me listening. -- David Hockney
Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing? -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century. -- David Hockney
A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me. -- David Hockney
I'm not really looking for theater work. But if somebody approaches me with enthusiasm, I might respond. -- David Hockney
The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off. -- David Hockney
No one has ever asked to see my degree certificate. -- David Hockney
I'm sure that the camera is part of European art. -- David Hockney
I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure. I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair. -- David Hockney
Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they? -- David Hockney
What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space. -- David Hockney
All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
I've always felt very English. -- David Hockney
I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway. -- David Hockney
I love California; everything is so artificial. -- David Hockney
There would be no bohemia without smoking. -- David Hockney
I think my father would have liked to have been an artist, actually. But I think he didn't quite have perhaps the drive or, I don't know, I mean he had a family to bring up I suppose. -- David Hockney
I feel 30.[Publo] Picasso said he always felt 30. Well, I do. -- David Hockney
When you're very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom. It's quite exciting, and you're prepared to do anything. -- David Hockney
I've always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface. -- David Hockney
There's no need to believe what an artist says. Believe what he does; that's what counts. -- David Hockney
Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look -- David Hockney
I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful. -- David Hockney
I'm a natural sceptic. -- David Hockney
I'm a bit claustrophobic, I know that now. -- David Hockney
Great claims are being made for the photograph as truth. We are showing you things, we show you the war. I say you can't actually. The camera can't. -- David Hockney
I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium. -- David Hockney
When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing. -- David Hockney
Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft. -- David Hockney
The moment rules over everything. -- David Hockney
Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill. -- David Hockney
I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music. -- David Hockney
No theoretician, no writer on art, however interesting he or she might be, could be as interesting as Picasso. A good writer on art may give you an insight to Picasso, but, after all, Picasso was there first. -- David Hockney
I was never that interested in movies. I was interested in them as a thing, but I didn't want to make movies. I always wanted to draw and paint. -- David Hockney
I see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay. -- David Hockney
I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one. -- David Hockney
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. -- David Hockney
All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent. -- David Hockney