Quotes By David Hockney

I'm fed up with being bossed around.

Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!

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.

I've realized that I can do performances.

I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that's it.

I paint what I like, when I like and where I like.

Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.

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.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

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.

I'm not really looking for theater work. But if somebody approaches me with enthusiasm, I might respond.

Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill.

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.

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.

Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?

I value my friends.

Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.

Ultimately, I'm about liberty and I think you have to defend it.

I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.

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.

Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.

Well, in Bradford I could say I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood.

I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.

I'm a bit claustrophobic, I know that now.

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.

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.

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.

There are enough no smoking places now.

It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.

Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?