Quotes By David Hockney

The moment rules over everything.

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

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

We grow small trying to be great.

I live wherever I happen to be.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Spring is very energising to me.

Anything simple always interests me.

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

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

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.

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

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

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

I prefer living in color.

Tragedy is a literary concept.

I'm very attracted to the great open spaces of the West.

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.

In fact, most artists want to make things a bit more difficult for themselves as they go along, to challenge themselves.

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.

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.

California is always in my mind.