Top 200 David Hockney Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That’s the real problem, the perspective picture.”

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

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

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

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

107. “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

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

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

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

123. “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

124. “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

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

— David Hockney

126. “Paint something every day.”

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

129. “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

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

— David Hockney

131. “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

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

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

140. “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

141. “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

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

— David Hockney

143. “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

144. “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

145. “The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway – it is called medication.”

— David Hockney

146. “It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.”

— David Hockney

147. “I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It’s a bit obsessive. That’s why I can’t do it all the time.”

— David Hockney

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

— David Hockney

149. “Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.”

— David Hockney

150. “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