David Hockney Quotes
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Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.
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Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out.
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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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I'm not antisocial. I like people.
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I'm always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.
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Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.
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I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s.
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A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
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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.
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I've always wanted to be able to paint the dawn.
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Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.
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I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.
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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.
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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.
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A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.