David Hockney Drawing Quotations

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium.

I mean if you draw you like drawing, it's er, an activity you do all the time actually.

Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?

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 see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay.

I thought the iPhone was great, but this takes it to a new level - simply because it's eight times the size of the iPhone, as big as a reasonably-sized sketchbook... Anyone who likes drawing and mark-making will like to explore new media.

People from the village come up and tease me: 'We hear you've started drawing on your telephone.' And I tell them, 'Well, no, actually, it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad,'

We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn't happen in music.

It's all one to me: opera, painting, drawing, faxes.

Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about... I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there... to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution...

I never talk when I'm drawing a person, especially if I'm making line drawings. I prefer there to be no noise at all so I can concentrate more.

Movie actors disappear - any young person wouldn't know Cary Grant. They're going to disappear. Fifty years ago, you thought film was here to stay. But nothing is here to stay, actually - except perhaps paintings and drawings.

On the 31st of October 2011 year, I had a mini-stroke. I couldn't finish my sentences. So I went to the doctor. It was a tiny one. The speech came back in a month or so. I did notice I could draw even better, I felt. I was concentrating more. And I wasn't talking much, but I was drawing. I said, "Well, I don't have to talk much."

Drawing takes time. A line has time in it

Painting and drawing has been here for 35,000 years.