David Hockney Quotes - Page 8

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

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium.

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

I'm a bit claustrophobic, I don't like crowds, I live by the sea - that's what I see when I come out of my house in Bridlington.

I've realized that I can do performances.

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

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

It's no good saying I wished I could go out more, because I can't. But I don't bother about it too much.

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.

Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.

I see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay.

You would think death was an optional extra nowadays. Nobody wants to tick that box.

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

We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn't happen in music.

How can Blair fight a war on terror? Terror is not an ideology or an army; terror is a technique.

Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.

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.

Until I saw my drawings replayed on the iPad, I'd never seen myself draw. Someone watching me would be concentrating on the exact moment, but I'd always be thinking a little bit ahead. That's especially so in a drawing where you are limiting yourself, a line drawing for example. When you are doing them you are very tense, because you have to reduce everything to such simple terms.

The only people who need degrees are dentists and brain surgeons.

There would be no bohemia without smoking.

The lens is a tyranny.

Any artist will tell you he's really only interested in the stuff he's doing now. He will, always. It's true, and it should be like that.

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.

Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model.