I usually only draw myself in down periods. I do, actually. I suppose that's why I often draw myself looking grim. I just think, 'Let's have a look in the mirror.' When you are alone and you look in a mirror you never put on a pleasing smile. Well, you don't, do you?

In the end nobody knows how it's done - how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic …

He [Hockney's father] hardly ever left Bradford. He was a member of CND and a socialist with a rather romantic and naive idea of what Soviet Russia was like, a…

We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.

Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.

Is not the training of an artist a training in the due relation of one thing with another, and in the faculty of expressing that relation clearly; and, even mo…

Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself. An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide;and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dea…