David Hockney Quotes

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

I try to make pictures I would want to see.

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

Created stuff is meant to be shared. That’s why the creative person created it. Why else do creative people exist?

Art consists in making others feel what we feel.

What is art? (...) Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

What kind of art do I want to make? What do I stand for? What inspires me? And then to have people in return respond to that... I think that's the greatest thing because throughout dancing, I'm always looking for that.

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

Why write [about my art]? Why not just show the photographs?

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Art is all about the experience. I could say I don't really relate to opera, but then you watch Placido Domingo, and you go, 'Blimey, look at that.'

I guess what all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to be thought provoking.

Artists don't really want to be marginalized. They believe that everybody should be able to appreciate the experience that an artist gives them, an experience that connects us to each other in a deep way.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

For me, art is always a kind of theater.

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

Communication is very important. And the arts do that, whether it's film or theater.

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.