Top 200 David Hockney Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive.”

— David Hockney

52. “Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.”

— David Hockney

53. “We all know a mirror reflects us, if you look in it. If you move, the reflection moves. If you project from a mirror, meaning it will project an image, it’s nothing to do with you. The world seen by nobody.”

— David Hockney

54. “The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.”

— David Hockney

55. “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.”

— David Hockney

56. “I never work with music. I hate background music, always did. I only like music in the foreground, meaning, deliberately listen to it, actually.”

— David Hockney

57. “There’s a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man’s art.”

— David Hockney

58. “I’m fed up with being bossed around.”

— David Hockney

59. “It’s all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops – for a split second.”

— David Hockney

60. “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.”

— David Hockney

61. “Always live in the ugliest house on the street – then you don’t have to look at it.”

— David Hockney

62. “The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.”

— David Hockney

63. “In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can’t divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.”

— David Hockney

64. “It’s difficult to talk about colour, even remember colour actually.”

— David Hockney

65. “Photography sees surfaces, it doesn’t see space. We see space but the camera doesn’t.”

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

67. “I’m a bit claustrophobic, I don’t like crowds, I live by the sea – that’s what I see when I come out of my house in Bridlington.”

— David Hockney

68. “Water colours are wet colours in water.”

— David Hockney

69. “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.”

— David Hockney

70. “I worked in the NHS as a hospital orderly during my national service, and people thought it was a noble service. But over the years it’s lost its humanity.”

— David Hockney

71. “Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want.”

— David Hockney

72. “Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.”

— David Hockney

73. “About shadows: do we see shadows? Loads of people don’t. A camera will notice a shadow, but how many people have got a shadow in front of them when they take a picture and don’t notice it, and then they see it in the photograph because the photograph will catch the shadow.”

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

75. “If you like music you like silence actually.”

— David Hockney

76. “In the end nobody knows how it’s done – how art is made. It can’t be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn’t explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.”

— David Hockney

77. “I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It’s an interesting one and it’s a permanent one; there’s no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There’s no set rule.”

— David Hockney

78. “People criticized me for my photography. They said it’s not art.”

— David Hockney

79. “If we are to change our world view, images have to change.”

— David Hockney

80. “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.”

— David Hockney

81. “I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way – that’s one of its effects. It’s not spatial.”

— David Hockney

82. “No one has ever asked to see my degree certificate.”

— David Hockney

83. “You would think death was an optional extra nowadays. Nobody wants to tick that box.”

— David Hockney

84. “West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.”

— David Hockney

85. “Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven’t got that kind of energy, or skill.”

— David Hockney

86. “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.”

— David Hockney

87. “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.”

— David Hockney

88. “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.”

— David Hockney

89. “The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That’s the real problem, the perspective picture.”

— David Hockney

90. “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.”

— David Hockney

91. “I’m really only interested in technology that is about pictures. I’m interested in anything that makes a picture.”

— David Hockney

92. “I do believe that painting can change the world.”

— David Hockney

93. “I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can’t hear, you somehow see.”

— David Hockney

94. “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.”

— David Hockney

95. “Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.”

— David Hockney

96. “I’m always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.”

— David Hockney

97. “You can’t name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.”

— David Hockney

98. “Well you can’t teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.”

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

100. “The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography.”

— David Hockney