David Hockney Quotations | Page 3

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.

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.

If you are not playful you are not alive.

There's no need to believe what an artist says. Believe what he does; that's what counts.

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.

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?

Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model.

We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn't happen in music.

I love California; everything is so artificial.

Loads of people, particularly artists, hate pretty pictures. Now I've never met anyone who didn't like a pretty face.

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?

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.

No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and it has to be organized into shapes...

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.

Paint something every day.

Until I saw my drawings replayed on the iPad, I'd never seen myself draw. Someone watching me would be concentrating on the exact moment, but I'd always be thinking a little bit ahead. That's especially so in a drawing where you are limiting yourself, a line drawing for example. When you are doing them you are very tense, because you have to reduce everything to such simple terms.

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.

When you're very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom. It's quite exciting, and you're prepared to do anything.

No one has ever asked to see my degree certificate.

There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art.

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,'

I do believe that painting can change the world.

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.

Water colours are wet colours in water.

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.

I have never really done any teaching and maybe I should have done. I am not power-mad enough.

There would be no bohemia without smoking.

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.

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.

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look

I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!

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.

I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure...ther e is always, everywhere, an enormous amount of suffering. But I believe my duty as an artist is to overcome and alleviate the sterility of despair...New ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling... I do believe that painting can change the world.

The only people who need degrees are dentists and brain surgeons.

When she told me that, I told her, well, shut up, because Mr and Mrs Clark and Blanche doesn't sound as good as Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. And it was my title, not hers, anyway.

Pubs aren't health clubs. To me, we're creating a suburban dreariness that would drive me mad.

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.

In my old age, I'll be in L.A.

Smoking, ... calms me down. And it's enjoyable. A little bit of what you fancy does you good. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life. These are decisions you make yourself, not government.

It's really about liberty. I'm very concerned about a growing intolerance and bossiness throughout society. Pubs are not health clubs.

the great strength is that the art worked outside of galleries and museums. It did not need them. (They need it.)