Top 200 David Hockney Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Of course you can still paint landscape – it’s not been worn out.”

— David Hockney

102. “The vanishing point leads to the missiles of today, which can take us out of this world. It could be that the west’s greatest mistakes were the ‘invention’ of the external vanishing point and the internal combustion engine.”

— David Hockney

103. “I’ve always been a looker. Loads of people say, “I never saw that” – but that’s what artists do.”

— David Hockney

104. “Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model.”

— David Hockney

105. “No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and it has to be organized into shapes...”

— David Hockney

106. “An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He’s a worker, always.”

— David Hockney

107. “The ‘how’ has a great effect on what we see. To say that ‘what we see’ is more important than ‘how we see it’ is to think that ‘how’ has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that ‘how’ often affects ‘what’ we see.”

— David Hockney

108. “Great claims are being made for the photograph as truth. We are showing you things, we show you the war. I say you can’t actually. The camera can’t.”

— David Hockney

109. “I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that’s all about photography, and photography’s not that interesting, and it’s changing anyway.”

— David Hockney

110. “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.”

— David Hockney

111. “No theoretician, no writer on art, however interesting he or she might be, could be as interesting as Picasso. A good writer on art may give you an insight to Picasso, but, after all, Picasso was there first.”

— David Hockney

112. “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.”

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

114. “Painting and drawing has been here for 35,000 years.”

— David Hockney

115. “How difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don’t.”

— David Hockney

116. “What I didn’t know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.”

— David Hockney

117. “The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off.”

— David Hockney

118. “I mean if you draw you like drawing, it’s er, an activity you do all the time actually.”

— David Hockney

119. “All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it’s got to be organized.”

— David Hockney

120. “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.”

— David Hockney

121. “With watercolour, you can’t cover up the marks. There’s the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well.”

— David Hockney

122. “The video camera dominates art. It’s a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.”

— David Hockney

123. “Every good artist I know, I always think works hard, we’re working all the time.”

— David Hockney

124. “It’s a myth that if you’re liked by only four people it must be good. It might also be very bad: they might be your mother, your brother, your uncle and your aunt.”

— David Hockney

125. “I’ve never been interested in, much in the politics of the art world, it doesn’t interest me.”

— David Hockney

126. “There’s no need to believe what an artist says. Believe what he does; that’s what counts.”

— David Hockney

127. “Once you start painting, you could of course get lost. I mean you get out of yourself, you don’t know whether you’re thinking, you just act actually sometimes.”

— David Hockney

128. “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?”

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

130. “There are enough no smoking places now.”

— David Hockney

131. “Time is the great mystery anyway. And it’s still the great mystery in the moving picture as well.”

— David Hockney

132. “Paint something every day.”

— David Hockney

133. “When you’re very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom. It’s quite exciting, and you’re prepared to do anything.”

— David Hockney

134. “I never talk when I’m drawing a person, especially if I’m making line drawings. I prefer there to be no noise at all so I can concentrate more.”

— David Hockney

135. “I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.”

— David Hockney

136. “It’s very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.”

— David Hockney

137. “The pictures on the walls aren’t like movies. They don’t move, they don’t talk, and they’ll last longer. They will last longer.”

— David Hockney

138. “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.”

— David Hockney

139. “A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.”

— David Hockney

140. “I’m not really looking for theater work. But if somebody approaches me with enthusiasm, I might respond.”

— David Hockney

141. “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.”

— David Hockney

142. “People from the village come up and tease me: ‘We hear you’ve started drawing on your telephone.’ And I tell them, ‘Well, no, actually, it’s just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad,’”

— David Hockney

143. “I haven’t stopped painting or drawing – I’ve just added another medium.”

— David Hockney

144. “I don’t value prizes of any sort.”

— David Hockney

145. “I’ve no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way – the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that – made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.”

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

147. “In fact, I’m a bit of a slob, but I’ve always said my excuse, I have a higher sense of order, I can see it where others can’t. That’s my excuse for slobbery, I must admit, but I think it’s a good one.”

— David Hockney

148. “Tobacco is America’s greatest gift to the world!”

— David Hockney

149. “I think we’re in a very exciting time – visually, I think we are. I’ve not got a crystal ball. I’m not saying I know what the future is at all. In some ways I’m getting quite pessimistic about the future, but in other ways I think it might get better. We are moving into very big changes.”

— David Hockney

150. “We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn’t happen in music.”

— David Hockney