Howard Hodgkin Quotes

My obsession with accumulation, which at times has taken on the whisper of a psychic illness - as anyone who has experienced the ode to the Collyer brothers that is my 'Vogue' office will concur - began in infancy.

To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.

Collection is an addiction.

Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.

Collecting is the sort of thing that creeps up on you.

I love collections of things, but always in moderation.

I'm an anorak. I've always been an obsessive collector of things. Richard Briers collects stamps. I collect cars and guns, which are much more expensive, and much more difficult to store.

I'm not a collector.

Passion is all but soft, it's not tender, it's violence to which you get hooked by pleasure.

It really is like a disease. I just couldn't get away from the theater.

It is like an addiction: I get addicted to performing and touring. I get itchy and think, 'I've got to do this.'

I have an addictive personality, so when I like something, I really want it all.

Most people have had that feeling of like, being obsessed with someone, and losing self control a bit, and that hopefully humanises addiction a bit.

You're an addiction...my obsession.

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.

Collectors become obsessive and then addicted. You become addicted to art and you can't live without it.

People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.

The trouble with addiction is that you can park the car but you can never switch off the engine or stop yourself from hearing the revs.

I wrote like a junkie. I had to have my daily fix.

But gamblers know how a man can sit for almost twenty-four hours at cards, without looking to right, or to left.

Addiction is when you can't get enough of what you don't want any more.

It’s like he has this power over me—like I have an eating disorder and he’s a package of Oreo Double Stuff cookies.

When you can stop you don't want to, and when you want to stop, you can't.

An addict is an addict. If they're not acting out in one area, it tends to come out in another. I think there was a time when I considered myself a work addict, but that's no longer accurate.

This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.