Quotes By David Hockney

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.

All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.

I avoid the public because the English public is too aggressive these days for me.

I'm not antisocial. I like people.

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

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

I think my father would have liked to have been an artist, actually. But I think he didn't quite have perhaps the drive or, I don't know, I mean he had a family to bring up I suppose.

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

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.

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

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.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

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.

To me, the world's rather beautiful if you look at it. Especially nature.

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.

Spring is very energising to me.

I'm interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.

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.

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