In one gallery they actually had a notice which said "No Sketching." H — David Hockney

"When conventions are old, theres quite a good reason, its not arbitrary. So Picasso discovered that, as it were, and Im sure that for him that was probably almost as exciting as discovering Cubism, rediscovering conventions of ordinary appearance, one-point perspective or something. The purists think youre going backwards, but I know youd go forward. Future art that is based on appearances wont look like the art thats gone before. Even revivals of a period are not the same. The Renaissance is not the same as ancient Greece; the Gothic revival is not the same as Gothic. It might look like that at first, but you can tell its not. The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldnt necessarily be."

"With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. Thats not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isnt it? There will be painting again, absolutely!"

"He [Hockneys 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, all cornfields and ballet. He would have gone mad for email because he was always sending letters to world leaders — Eisenhower, Mao, Stalin — telling them what was what. I think he imagined the Politburo would hold up his letter and say, "Hold everything, Kenneth Hockney has written again!""

"It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them."

"Theres no doubt you smoke to calm yourself. I know I do. Thats my decision about how I keep calm. I prefer that to Prozac. In fact I think its healthier. I couldnt go to another New York party where theyre all drinking water and on Prozac and telling you off for smoking."

"Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldnt leave them about, he thought of them as working drawings. I understand what he was doing: discovering whats there. And then when you come to use line, if you know what youre looking at, its much easier to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution to what you want to depict."