David Hockney Quotes

Make everything as simple as possible but not simpler.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

It is easy to be accurate if you have the freedom to be complicated, and it is very easy to be simple if you have the freedom to shade the truth. What's hard is to be simple and very accurate, and that takes work to figure out what are the simple truths that are going to sustain your case.

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

Sometimes simple things are the most difficult things to achieve.

Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.

Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple.

In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo 's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern.

In mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting.

"Simple" is a tricky word, it can mean a lot of things. To us, it just means clear. That doesn't always mean total reduction, or minimalism - sometimes, to make things clearer, you have to add a step.

Big ideas are usually simple ideas.

Find the heart of it. Make the complex simple, and you can achieve mastery.

It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.

A drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

You can't say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.

In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.

Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.

Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.

Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

You can't believe how hard it is for people to be simple, how much they fear being simple. They worry that if they're simple, people will think they're simpleminded. In reality, of course, it's just the reverse. Clear, tough-minded people are the most simple.

Like all magnificent things, it's very simple.

The minute a thing is long and complicated, it confuses. Whoever wrote the Ten Commandments made 'em short. They may not always be kept, but they are understood.

If I go out into nature, into the unknown, to the fringes of knowledge, everything seems mixed up and contradictory, illogical, and incoherent. This is what research does; it smooths out contradictions and makes things simple, logical, and coherent.

If things were simple, word would have gotten around.