David Hockney Quotes

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

Whereas in America we are so fearful of mortality, we don't want to talk about it, we don't think about it, and in many ways we treat elderly people as invisible because they are a constant reminder of our own mortality. We put them away and put them in retirement homes so we don't want to deal with that.

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know not how to prevent dying.

I definitely think about death. And every day your relationship with death changes. And every day I sort of feel like I know it more. I've always thought about it.

My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.

Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.

It doesn't take that many years for a kid to realise that they're going to die. It's always there in the back of their mind the rest of their lives.

As a culture, we are not comfortable with mortality. We do not accept it the way other cultures do. We cling to youth, and we don't want to die. It's like, 'Well, too bad, we do.'

I am afraid of death, scared by it. I already don't know whether I exist or not. So dying really terrifies me.

It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.

The subject of death is taboo. We feel, perhaps only subconsciously, that to be in contact with death in any way, even indirectly, somehow confronts us with the prospect of our own deaths, draws our own deaths closer and makes them more real and thinkable.

Mortality applies to every aspect of life. The fear of death is the driving fear of life.

Accepting death is a massive problem for everybody.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

No doubt many people have the feeling that to talk about death at all is, in effect, to conjure it up mentally, to bring it closer in such a way that one has to face up to the inevitability of one's own eventual demise. So, to spare ourselves this psychological trauma, we decide just to try to avoid the topic as much as possible.

I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.

I'm happier because I had to face what all of us try not to face: that we're going to die. It's a fact.

We don't want to be reminded that life ends at some point, so they don't put older people on the screen.

I thought I was going to die when I was 39.

I am a serial denier. I try not to be. I tell myself, 'You are going to die.' I repeat it. I grasp it for a second or two, but then it escapes me, and I'm back to before.

I'm starting to get older, and began to think about mortality a little more. My mother died in 2003 and that was a big shock. When your parents start to die off, that's going to be a revelation. So for me, this album - although it might sound quite cheery - is really talking about death.

He who fears death dies every time he thinks of it.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.