David Hockney
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.Collection: Space
I'm a very early riser, and I don't like to miss that beautiful early morning light.Collection: Morning
Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.Collection: Art
Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.Collection: Positive
A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.Collection: Chance
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.Collection: Art
We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.Collection: Age
I'm interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.Collection: Computers
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.Collection: Experience
What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.Collection: Space
I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.Collection: Morning
Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.Collection: Poetry
I prefer living in color.
Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.
Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.
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.
Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.
Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!'
I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.
Anything simple always interests me.
To me, the world's rather beautiful if you look at it. Especially nature.
The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough.
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.
I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.
When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.
Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.
I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a bit of a propagandist.
I paint what I like, when I like and where I like.
Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.
The moment rules over everything.
There are enough no smoking places now.
I see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay.
I'm always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.
Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it.
I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can't hear, you somehow see.
It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.
Tragedy is a literary concept.
It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.
I'm a bit claustrophobic, I know that now.
Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!
Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.
West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
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.
As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it.
You must plan to be spontaneous.