Quotes by David Hockney

• We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.
• Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
• Well, in Bradford I could say I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood.
• What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.
• Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.
• 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.
• A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
• 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.
• Anything simple always interests me.
• Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.
• There are enough no smoking places now.
• Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it.
• I'm a bit claustrophobic, I know that now.
• We grow small trying to be great.
• The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.
• 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.
• 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.
• Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.
• 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.
• 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.
• It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.