I prefer living in color.
David Hockney
Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.
I'm a very early riser, and I don't like to miss that beautiful early morning light.
Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.
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.
Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it.
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.
Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.
Anything simple always interests me.
Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.
I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can't hear, you somehow see.
Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.
I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.
I paint what I like, when I like and where I like.
Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
You must plan to be spontaneous.
Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.
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 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.
What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.
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.
California is always in my mind.
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.'
Well, in Bradford I could say I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood.
I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.
We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.
As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it.
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?
Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out.
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.
But, I would always be thinking of how pictures are constructed and colour, how to use it, I mean you're using it for constructing, makes you think about it, the place did as well.
The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough.
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.
All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.
I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.
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.
I avoid the public because the English public is too aggressive these days for me.
All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.
You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.
When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.
To me, the world's rather beautiful if you look at it. Especially nature.
Spring is very energising to me.
Like people, trees are all individuals.
A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.
The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off.
I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s.
I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium.
