In my old age, I'll be in L.A.
— David Hockney
Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?
I go and see anything that's visually new, any technology that's about picture-making. The technology won't make the pictures different, but someone using it will.
Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.
Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out.
The moment rules over everything.
I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.
Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.
The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off.
Like people, trees are all individuals.
A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.
Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.
You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.
I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can't hear, you somehow see.
The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough.
It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.
I'm very attracted to the great open spaces of the West.
I see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay.
Britain is a very small country with a very large press.
Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.
I generally only paint people I know, I'm not a flatterer really.
When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.
I avoid the public because the English public is too aggressive these days for me.
It's no good saying I wished I could go out more, because I can't. But I don't bother about it too much.
Ultimately, I'm about liberty and I think you have to defend it.
Easel painting means small painting.
I'm fed up with being bossed around.
I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really.
Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don't draw very well can't do that.
I'm not antisocial. I like people.
All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.
I can often tell when drawings are done from photographs, because you can tell what they miss out, what the camera misses out: usually weight and volume - there's a flatness to them.
I'm a very early riser, and I don't like to miss that beautiful early morning light.
California is always in my mind.
Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!
I live wherever I happen to be.
I worked in the NHS as a hospital orderly during my national service, and people thought it was a noble service. But over the years it's lost its humanity.
I'm a bit of a propagandist.
You must plan to be spontaneous.
As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it.
People tell me they open my e-mails first, because they aren't demands and you don't need to reply. They're simply for pleasure.
I did come from a pretty independent-minded family.
On the iPhone I tended to draw with my thumb. Whereas the moment I got to the iPad, I found myself using every finger.
It's time to debate images, especially when someone's going to prison for downloading them.
I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s.
Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.
I prefer living in color.
I'm interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.
I'm always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.
My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.
