David Hockney Quotes
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When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.
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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.
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I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s.
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I live wherever I happen to be.
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Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.
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A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
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Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.
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Easel painting means small painting.
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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.
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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.
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The moment rules over everything.
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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.
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I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.
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I've always wanted to be able to paint the dawn.
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I'm not antisocial. I like people.
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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.
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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.
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As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it.
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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.
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Tragedy is a literary concept.
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A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.
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Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.
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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?'
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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.