Quotes By David Hockney

All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.

Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.

I'm not antisocial. I like people.

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.

I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.

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.

It's time to debate images, especially when someone's going to prison for downloading them.

What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.

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.

The moment rules over everything.

I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really.

We grow small trying to be great.

I live wherever I happen to be.

We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.

You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.

I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can't hear, you somehow see.

I can often tell when drawings are done from photographs, because you can tell what they miss out, what the camera misses out: usually weight and volume - there's a flatness to them.

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

I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.

Spring is very energising to me.

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.

Britain is a very small country with a very large press.

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

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.

Anything simple always interests me.

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.

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

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.

Tragedy is a literary concept.