Edward Hopper Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world… …The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm.

Edward Hopper
The people here in fact seem to live in the streets, which are alive from morning until night, not as they are in New York with that never-ending determination for the 'long-green', but with a pleasure-loving crowd that doesn't care what it does or where it goes, so that it has a good time.

Edward Hopper
Paris is a very graceful and beautiful city, almost too formal and sweet tot the taste after the raw disorder of New York. Everything seems to have been planned with the purpose of forming a most harmonious whole, which certainly has been done... Every street here is alive with all sorts of conditions of people, priests, nuns, students, and always the little soldiers with wide red pants.

Edward Hopper
I could just go a few steps [from the house where he stayed in Paris in 1906- 1907] and I'd see the Louvre across the river. From the corner of the rue de Bac and Lille (sic) you could see Sacré-Coeur. It hung like a great vision in the air above the city.

Edward Hopper
Just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express a thought in painting is. Thought is fluid. What you put on canvas is concrete, and it tends to direct the thought. The more you punt on canvas the more you lose control of the thought. I've never been able to paint what I set out to paint.

Edward Hopper
I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation which neither literature nor a purely plastic art deals with.

Edward Hopper
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

Edward Hopper
They are in a high key, somewhat like impressionism or a modified impressionism. I think I'm still an impressionist.

Edward Hopper
It is hard for me to know what to paint. It comes slowly.

Edward Hopper
If this end is unattainable, so, it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man's activities.

Edward Hopper
There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.

Edward Hopper
The technical obstacles of painting perhaps dictate this form. It derives also from the limitations of personality, and such may be the simplifications that I have attempted.

Edward Hopper
It seemed awful crude and raw here when I got back [after his return from his third and last trip to Europe, in 1910]. It took me ten years to get over Europe.

Edward Hopper
Originality is neither a matter of inventiveness nor method, it is the essence of personality.

Edward Hopper
Partly through choice, I was never willing to hire out more than three days a week [making illustrations for the magazines to support himself, c. 1912] I kept some time to do my own work. Illustrating was a depressing experience. And I didn't get very good prices because I didn't often do what they wanted.

Edward Hopper
Maybe I'm not very human. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of the house.

Edward Hopper
I do not know why I chose one subject rather than another unless I believe them to be the best synthesis of my inner experience.

Edward Hopper
I wish I could paint more.. I do dozens of sketches for oils.. if I do one that interests me I go on to make a painting but that happens only two or three times a year.

Edward Hopper
Ninety percent of them [artists in general] are forgotten ten minutes after they're dead.

Edward Hopper
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Edward Hopper
So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.

Edward Hopper
There may come, or perhaps has come, a time when no further progress in truthful representation is possible. There are those who say that such a point has been reached, an attempt to substitute a more and more simplified and decorative calligraphy. This direction is sterile and without hope to those who wish to give painting a richer and more human meaning and a wider scope. No one can correctly forecast the direction that painting will take in the next few years, but to me at least there seems to be a revulsion against the invention of arbitrary and stylized design.

Edward Hopper
Though I studied with Robert Henri, I was never a member of the Ash-Can School. You see, it had a sociological trend which didn't interest me.

Edward Hopper
The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

Edward Hopper
The man's the work. Something does not come out of nothing.

Edward Hopper
All I ever wanted to do is to paint sunlight on the side of a wall.

Edward Hopper
The domination of France in the plastic arts has been almost complete for the last thirty years or more in this country [America]. If an apprenticeship to a master has been necessary, I think we have served it. Any further relation of such a character can only mean humiliation to us. After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

Edward Hopper
Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

Edward Hopper
I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom.

Edward Hopper
One must perhaps qualify this statement and say that seemingly opposite tendencies each contain some modicum of the other. I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.

Edward Hopper