David Hockney Quotes - Page 5

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.

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.

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

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

I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money – I think that can be a burden – I’m greedy for an exciting life. I want it to be exciting all the time, and I get it, actually. On the other hand, I can find excitement, I admit, in raindrops falling on a puddle and a lot of people wouldn’t. I intend to have it exciting until the day I fall over.

On the iPhone I tended to draw with my thumb. Whereas the moment I got to the iPad, I found myself using every finger.

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

I worked in the NHS as a hospital orderly during my national service, and people thought it was a noble service. But over the years it's lost its humanity.

I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can't hear, you somehow see.

Every good artist I know, I always think works hard, we're working all the time.

The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be.

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

I'm really only interested in technology that is about pictures. I'm interested in anything that makes a picture.

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.

I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.

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.

I was always interested in photography because it makes a picture.

I was never that interested in movies. I was interested in them as a thing, but I didn't want to make movies. I always wanted to draw and paint.

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

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

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.

I did come from a pretty independent-minded family.

Movie actors disappear - any young person wouldn't know Cary Grant. They're going to disappear. Fifty years ago, you thought film was here to stay. But nothing is here to stay, actually - except perhaps paintings and drawings.

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.

All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.