Top 26 Quotes by Howard Hodgkin

I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

I don't think you can lightly paint a picture. It's an activity I take very seriously.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

I hate painting.

The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.

Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

I once was interviewed and got so exasperated that I said, 'What do you want, a shopping list?' They kept asking, 'What's in this picture?'

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.