380 Quotes by David Hockney

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.

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.

I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that’s it.

There’s a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man’s art.

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’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.

The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That’s the real problem, the perspective picture.

Time is the great mystery anyway. And it’s still the great mystery in the moving picture as well.

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!’