David Hockney Quotes

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.

There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.

I sketch while I'm on set, and it's a way for me to record all of the locations I've been to. I don't keep a diary but a sketchbook.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.

It's a question of trying to take down by dictation what's already there. I'm not making something, I'm trying to hear it.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

Perfect retention. I don't think I could do that-I've never disciplined myself to do it. I suppose a lot of it is a question of discipline. Which improvisation is not.

I am like a security camera ever on the watch. The furtive quality of vision feels to me like an incredibly valuable weapon. Everything I see gets transformed into a private sketch or painting in my mind, stored away for future reference, future evidence, future ammunition.

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

When you're looking for a band name, I know it sounds weird, but everything you look at, everything you observe and read, you kind of think, 'Man, maybe that could be our band name.'

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

The more you draw, the better you get.

You try to get mental reps through the eyes of others, then it's your job to kind of get your reps through your eyes. So that's kind of what I do.

God has given each one of us a gift greater than a thousand I.B.M. machines. It is called a memory, and everything that passes through our five senses is stored in this faculty.

The heart of creativity is discipline.

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

To paint things as they are requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.

Observe Everything. Communicate Well. Draw, Draw, Draw.

I have a theory that I did most of my observing probably before I was twenty, stored it, and am still drawing on it.