Creativity Quote by David Hockney

Hockney’s line lands like a tossed-off complaint, but it’s calibrated: a small sentence that doubles as a manifesto about freedom, taste, and the creeping reach of public policy. “Enough” is the pressure point. He’s not arguing that smoking is good; he’s arguing that regulation has passed from reasonable accommodation into a kind of moral zoning, where the public sphere keeps getting scrubbed of anything messy, risky, or unfashionable.

Coming from an artist whose work is saturated with pleasure, surface, and the everyday rituals of looking and lounging, the remark reads as aesthetic as much as political. Smoking, in Hockney’s world, isn’t only nicotine; it’s posture, tempo, a way the body occupies space. The cigarette is an accessory of the studio and the cafe, shorthand for a certain 20th-century bohemia that modern health culture has tried to delete. That’s the subtext: a defense of a disappearing social ecology, not just a habit.

The context matters because Hockney is of a generation that watched smoking go from glamorous default to social taboo with astonishing speed, especially in Britain and the U.S. The quote’s quiet provocation is its refusal to apologize. It pushes back on a culture that increasingly equates cleanliness with virtue, and virtue with authority. In eight words, Hockney sketches the modern tension between collective well-being and the individual’s right to be mildly offensive.