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"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."
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"The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science."

"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."

"As useful as an unhappy artist. As useless as a happy philosopher."

"You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet, because poetry is beyond hooks and holes."

"To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles; in fine, as Professor Alexander would say, I must enjoy him and not contemplate him."
Explore more quotes by Howard Hodgkin

"My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms."

"A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy."

"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 find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing."

"In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute."

"I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient."

"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?'"
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