David Hockney, born in 1937, is a celebrated British artist known for his versatile contributions to the art world. Rising to prominence in the 1960s as a leading figure in the Pop Art movement, Hockney’s work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and digital art. His vibrant and innovative style, characterized by bold colors, graphic compositions, and playful perspectives, explores themes of landscape, portraiture, and the human experience. Hockney’s use of technology, such as the iPad, to create art in his later years showcases his adaptability and forward-thinking approach. Throughout his career, he has received numerous accolades, solidifying his status as one of the most influential artists of his generation. Hockney’s works are celebrated for their energy, creativity, and enduring relevance, captivating audiences worldwide.

David Hockney Quotes

1. “You must plan to be spontaneous.”
— David Hockney

2. “Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.”
— David Hockney

3. “Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.”
— David Hockney

4. “I love California; everything is so artificial.”
— David Hockney

5. “California is always in my mind.”
— David Hockney

6. “I’m a very early riser, and I don’t like to miss that beautiful early morning light.”
— David Hockney

7. “It takes a long time to make it simple.”
— David Hockney

8. “I’ve finally figured out what’s wrong with photography. It’s a one-eyed man looking through a little ’ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?”
— David Hockney

9. “There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don’t mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.”
— David Hockney

10. “Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.”
— David Hockney

11. “On the iPhone I tended to draw with my thumb. Whereas the moment I got to the iPad, I found myself using every finger.”
— David Hockney

12. “Drawing takes time. A line has time in it.”
— David Hockney

13. “If you are not playful you are not alive.”
— David Hockney

14. “When you stop doing something, it doesn’t mean you are rejecting the previous work. That’s the mistake; it’s not rejecting it, it’s saying, ‘I have exploited it enough now and I wish to take a look at another corner.’”
— David Hockney

15. “Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look.”
— David Hockney

16. “I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Now, I admit, there are not too many people who would find that exciting. But I would. And I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.”
— David Hockney

17. “I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.”
— David Hockney

18. “My only worry is the painting I’m doing. Nothing else.”
— David Hockney

20. “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.”
— David Hockney

21. “OH, I LIKE smoking, I do. I smoke for my health, my mental health. Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life. I don’t suppose anyone smoking a pipe would have road rage, would they?”
— David Hockney

22. “Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.”
— David Hockney

23. “The moment you can learn to deal with homosexuality in art, it’s quite an exciting moment, just as in a sense when people ‘come out’ it’s quite an exciting moment. It means they become aware of their desires, and can deal with them in a remarkably honest way.”
— David Hockney

24. “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!’”
— David Hockney

25. “Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.”
— David Hockney

26. “I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one.”
— David Hockney

27. “There would be no bohemia without smoking.”
— David Hockney

28. “I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure. I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair.”
— David Hockney

29. “I see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay.”
— David Hockney

30. “Smoking calms me down. It’s enjoyable. I don’t want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.”
— David Hockney

31. “All art is contemporary, if it’s alive, and if it’s not alive, what’s the point of it?”
— David Hockney

32. “Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don’t draw very well can’t do that.”
— David Hockney

33. “Photoshop came out of painting, and now it’s going back to painting.”
— David Hockney

34. “Anything simple always interests me.”
— David Hockney

35. “Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people – the point where we go inside them – is the face. It tells all.”
— David Hockney

36. “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.”
— David Hockney

37. “The photograph isn’t good enough. It’s not real enough.”
— David Hockney

38. “Just because I’m cheeky, doesn’t mean I’m not serious.”
— David Hockney

39. “I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.”
— David Hockney

40. “The camera can’t see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.”
— David Hockney

41. “I have got an iPad, what a joy! Van Gogh would have loved it, and he could have written his letters on it as well.”
— David Hockney

42. “I’m convinced that technology and art go together – and always have, for centuries.”
— David Hockney

43. “We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.”
— David Hockney

44. “I’m very attracted to the great open spaces of the West.”
— David Hockney

45. “I’ve always been interested in space in pictures. I think my going deaf increased my spatial sense, because I can’t get the direction of sound. I feel that I see space very clearly, and that’s because I can’t hear it. So it’s a compensatory thing.”
— David Hockney

46. “I did come from a pretty independent-minded family.”
— David Hockney

47. “Loads of people, particularly artists, hate pretty pictures. Now I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like a pretty face.”
— David Hockney

48. “There’s no-one up there in Northern Norway, food’s terrible, but it’s very, very beautiful to look at, if you’ve got eyes, and enjoy looking.”
— David Hockney

49. “I’m coming ’round to the view that there’s only a personal view of the world.”
— David Hockney

50. “The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.”
— David Hockney

51. “If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive.”
— David Hockney

52. “Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.”
— David Hockney

53. “We all know a mirror reflects us, if you look in it. If you move, the reflection moves. If you project from a mirror, meaning it will project an image, it’s nothing to do with you. The world seen by nobody.”
— David Hockney

54. “The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.”
— David Hockney

55. “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.”
— David Hockney

56. “I never work with music. I hate background music, always did. I only like music in the foreground, meaning, deliberately listen to it, actually.”
— David Hockney

57. “I’m fed up with being bossed around.”
— David Hockney

58. “It’s all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops – for a split second.”
— David Hockney

59. “There’s a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man’s art.”
— David Hockney

60. “Shadows sometimes people don’t see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.”
— David Hockney

61. “Always live in the ugliest house on the street – then you don’t have to look at it.”
— David Hockney

62. “The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.”
— David Hockney

63. “In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can’t divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.”
— David Hockney

64. “Photography sees surfaces, it doesn’t see space. We see space but the camera doesn’t.”
— David Hockney

65. “I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.”
— David Hockney

66. “It’s difficult to talk about colour, even remember colour actually.”
— David Hockney

67. “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.”
— David Hockney

68. “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.”
— David Hockney

69. “Water colours are wet colours in water.”
— David Hockney

70. “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.”
— David Hockney

71. “Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want.”
— David Hockney

72. “Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.”
— David Hockney

73. “The only people who need degrees are dentists and brain surgeons.”
— David Hockney

74. “People criticized me for my photography. They said it’s not art.”
— David Hockney

75. “In the end nobody knows how it’s done – how art is made. It can’t be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn’t explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.”
— David Hockney

76. “About shadows: do we see shadows? Loads of people don’t. A camera will notice a shadow, but how many people have got a shadow in front of them when they take a picture and don’t notice it, and then they see it in the photograph because the photograph will catch the shadow.”
— David Hockney

77. “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.”
— David Hockney

78. “If we are to change our world view, images have to change.”
— David Hockney

79. “No one has ever asked to see my degree certificate.”
— David Hockney

80. “I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It’s an interesting one and it’s a permanent one; there’s no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There’s no set rule.”
— David Hockney

81. “I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way – that’s one of its effects. It’s not spatial.”
— David Hockney

82. “If you like music you like silence actually.”
— David Hockney

83. “You would think death was an optional extra nowadays. Nobody wants to tick that box.”
— David Hockney

84. “West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.”
— David Hockney

85. “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.”
— David Hockney

86. “Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven’t got that kind of energy, or skill.”
— David Hockney

87. “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.”
— David Hockney

88. “I’m really only interested in technology that is about pictures. I’m interested in anything that makes a picture.”
— David Hockney

89. “I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can’t hear, you somehow see.”
— David Hockney

90. “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.”
— David Hockney

91. “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.”
— David Hockney

92. “I do believe that painting can change the world.”
— David Hockney

93. “And then I went round the corner and there’s a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it’s not the level of Van Gogh.”
— David Hockney

94. “Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.”
— David Hockney

95. “I’m always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.”
— David Hockney

96. “The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography.”
— David Hockney

97. “The vanishing point leads to the missiles of today, which can take us out of this world. It could be that the west’s greatest mistakes were the ‘invention’ of the external vanishing point and the internal combustion engine.”
— David Hockney

98. “You can’t name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.”
— David Hockney

99. “I’ve always been a looker. Loads of people say, “I never saw that” – but that’s what artists do.”
— David Hockney

100. “Of course you can still paint landscape – it’s not been worn out.”
— David Hockney

101. “The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That’s the real problem, the perspective picture.”
— David Hockney

102. “No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and it has to be organized into shapes…”
— David Hockney

103. “Well you can’t teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.”
— David Hockney

104. “Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model.”
— David Hockney

105. “An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He’s a worker, always.”
— David Hockney

106. “I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.”
— David Hockney

107. “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.”
— David Hockney

108. “Great claims are being made for the photograph as truth. We are showing you things, we show you the war. I say you can’t actually. The camera can’t.”
— David Hockney

109. “I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that’s all about photography, and photography’s not that interesting, and it’s changing anyway.”
— David Hockney

110. “What I didn’t know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.”
— David Hockney

111. “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.”
— David Hockney

112. “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.”
— David Hockney

113. “I mean if you draw you like drawing, it’s er, an activity you do all the time actually.”
— David Hockney

114. “Well, in Bradford I could say I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood.”
— David Hockney

115. “Painting and drawing has been here for 35,000 years.”
— David Hockney

116. “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.”
— David Hockney

117. “The ‘how’ has a great effect on what we see. To say that ‘what we see’ is more important than ‘how we see it’ is to think that ‘how’ has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that ‘how’ often affects ‘what’ we see.”
— David Hockney

118. “With watercolour, you can’t cover up the marks. There’s the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well.”
— David Hockney

119. “Every good artist I know, I always think works hard, we’re working all the time.”
— David Hockney

120. “The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off.”
— David Hockney

121. “I’ve never been interested in, much in the politics of the art world, it doesn’t interest me.”
— David Hockney

122. “There’s no need to believe what an artist says. Believe what he does; that’s what counts.”
— David Hockney

123. “How difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don’t.”
— David Hockney

124. “Once you start painting, you could of course get lost. I mean you get out of yourself, you don’t know whether you’re thinking, you just act actually sometimes.”
— David Hockney

125. “It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.”
— David Hockney

126. “Paint something every day.”
— David Hockney

127. “When you’re very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom. It’s quite exciting, and you’re prepared to do anything.”
— David Hockney

128. “I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.”
— David Hockney

129. “The pictures on the walls aren’t like movies. They don’t move, they don’t talk, and they’ll last longer. They will last longer.”
— David Hockney

130. “A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.”
— David Hockney

131. “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?”
— David Hockney

132. “I’m not really looking for theater work. But if somebody approaches me with enthusiasm, I might respond.”
— David Hockney

133. “There are enough no smoking places now.”
— David Hockney

134. “Time is the great mystery anyway. And it’s still the great mystery in the moving picture as well.”
— David Hockney

135. “The video camera dominates art. It’s a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.”
— David Hockney

136. “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.”
— David Hockney

137. “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.”
— David Hockney

138. “It’s very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.”
— David Hockney

139. “All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it’s got to be organized.”
— David Hockney

140. “In fact, I’m a bit of a slob, but I’ve always said my excuse, I have a higher sense of order, I can see it where others can’t. That’s my excuse for slobbery, I must admit, but I think it’s a good one.”
— David Hockney

141. “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.”
— David Hockney

142. “Tobacco is America’s greatest gift to the world!”
— David Hockney

143. “I think we’re in a very exciting time – visually, I think we are. I’ve not got a crystal ball. I’m not saying I know what the future is at all. In some ways I’m getting quite pessimistic about the future, but in other ways I think it might get better. We are moving into very big changes.”
— David Hockney

144. “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.”
— David Hockney

145. “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.”
— David Hockney

146. “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.”
— David Hockney

147. “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.”
— David Hockney

148. “When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.”
— David Hockney

149. “Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.”
— David Hockney

150. “But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.”
— David Hockney