Edward Hopper Short Quotes

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

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
Recognition does not mean so much, you never get it when you need it.

Edward Hopper
After I took up etchings [c. 1915], my paintings seemed to crystallize.

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

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

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

Edward Hopper
In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.

Edward Hopper
My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature.

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's probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don't know. It could be the whole human condition.

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
The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.

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

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
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
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
I was always interested in architecture, but the editors [of the magazines who demanded these subjects for the illustrations of Hopper] wanted people waving with their arms.

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
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