Edward Hopper Quotes

Well, I've always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can't exactly describe the sensations, but they're entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics.

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

I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds.

If the picture needs varnishing later, I allow a restorer to do that, if there's any restoring necessary.

I once got a little camera to use for details of architecture and so forth but the photo was always so different from the perspective the eye gives, I gave it up.

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.

I guess I'm not very human. All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house.

The only real influence I've ever had is myself.

If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.

So many people say painting is fun. I don't find it fun at all. It's hard work for me.

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

To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're traveling.

Yes, linseed oil. I used to use poppy oil, but I have heard that poppy oil is given to cracking pigment too, so I use it no longer.

There is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house.

Everyone goes to the 'Grands-Boulevards' (in Paris, ed.) and let himself loose ... Do not picture these in costume, they are not for the most part ... perhaps a clown with a big nose, or two girls with bare necks and short skirts ... the parade of the queens of the halls (markets) is also one of the events ... Some are pretty but look awkward in their silk dresses and crowns, particularly as the broad sun displays their defects - perhaps a neck too thin or a painted face which shows ghastley white in the sunlight.

In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

I think that zinc white has a property of scaling and cracking.

If I had the energy, I would have done it all over the county.

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

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

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.

If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.

What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.