Quotes By David Hockney

I'm fed up with being bossed around.

Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!

I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that's it.

I paint what I like, when I like and where I like.

Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.

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.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

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.

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?

Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill.

Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?

I value my friends.

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.

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

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

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

Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.

Ultimately, I'm about liberty and I think you have to defend it.

I'm a bit claustrophobic, I know that now.

Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.

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

I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.

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.

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.

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.

As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it.

Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?

I mean if you draw you like drawing, it's er, an activity you do all the time actually.

There are enough no smoking places now.

It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.