Edward Hopper Quotes

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Edward Hopper

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

If only I could cry. I am beyond that. The light, the light, lending itself to empty downtown Saturday, but still the stupid insensate cars flush by oblivious to their stupidity, my silent plea.
It isn't Mexico. It's not Paris. It's a painting by Hopper come to life. I am trapped inside a dead thing. Language is impossible here, even in English. Who has the arrogance to say: I'm mad, this is my crazy view of things, help me.
I'm trapped in a silent world, a tableau of forty years ago. The walls are different, the tables, the heights of the veiling and the chairs. I loom above this letter. The view past the rows of cakes in the plate glass window is unfamiliar. I am a ghost. There is nothing now between me and death. Death is the unfamiliarity of everything, the strangeness of the once familiar. The same spatial configurations only the light is hollow, sick.
I think I lack the energy to hit expensive discos which I don't know where they are to be rejected tonight. I look passable. My energy's low. I love to dance but despair is not a good muse.
This Mexico, babe. Men who don't love you but act wildly as if they do initially. Self-involved, narcissistic men... The men drink and philosophize about pain. The women live it solo and culturelessly. No one cries, except easily, sentimentally. The devil, therefore God, exists.
Oaxaca was a pushover compared to this. Pain had boundaries there.
Spare us big cities, oh lord! ~ Maryse Holder

I always say Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is my biggest influence. But for painters, I like many, many painters, but I love Francis Bacon the most, and Edward Hopper. ~ David Lynch

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. ~ Edward Hopper

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. ~ Edward Hopper

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

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. ~ Edward Hopper

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

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

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. ~ Edward Hopper

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. ~ Edward Hopper

There is a famous painting, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. I am in love with that painting. Sometimes, I think everyone is like the people in that painting, everyone lost in their own private universes of pain or sorrow or guilt, everyone remote and unknowable. The painting reminds me of you. It breaks my heart. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

Maine likes to call itself 'America's Vacationland.' For many artists, though, it's the office. Since the 19th century, painters from all over the country - including Edward Hopper, Alex Katz, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver and Andrew Wyeth - have spent large chunks of time there. ~ Terry Teachout

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

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

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

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

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

That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper's images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as "our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness" ...
Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs. ~ Olivia Laing

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. ~ Edward Hopper

My room is cheerfully located between the sixth-floor elevators. The springs of my bed wheeze. The elevator dings. The ice machine right outside my door rumbles forth its icy bounty, a steady tattoo that beats "Stay up! Stay up!" I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint. ~ David Rakoff

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

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

Directors who have inspired me include Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini, lngmar Bergman, John Ford, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Ernst Lubitsch. In art school, I studied painters like Edward Hopper, who used urban motifs, Franz Kafka is my favorite novelist. My approach to film stems from my art background, as I go beyond the story to the sub-conscious mood created by sound and images. ~ David Lynch

America, the Idea of: We yearned for its beer and jazz, its smoke-filled nightclubs, its Edward Hopper bars, the melancholy of rainy Manhattan Gershwin nights ... the America we yearned for has gone. Did it ever exist? ~ Michael Bywater

I collect the walks of my life. Some people have asked me if I have walked so very far to merit such an activity, but I say to them, it's not about how far you have walked, but how thoroughly. ~ Edward Carey

The United States has faced threats from criminal groups, from terrorists, from spies throughout our history, and we have limited our responses. We haven't resorted to total war every time we have a conflict around the world, because that restraint is what defines us. That restraint is what gives us the moral standing to lead the world. ~ Edward Snowden

It was a something found that had long been sought for by a thousand restless yearnings and vague desires, less of the heart than mind; not as when youth discovers the one to be beloved, but rather as when the student, long wandering after the clew to some truth in science, sees it glimmer dimly before him, to beckon, to recede, to allure, and to wane again. She fell at last into unquiet slumber, vexed by deformed, fleeting, shapeless phantoms; and, waking, as the sun, through a veil of hazy cloud, glinted with a sickly ray across the casement, she heard her father settled back betimes to his one pursuit, and calling forth from his Familiar a low mournful strain, like a dirge over the dead. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien. ~ Edward Dahlberg

Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave. ~ William Butler Yeats

Our global forests are the lungs of the world, and protecting them is fundamental for our survival. When we hand these forests over to future generations, we must be able to say we exercised our stewardship wisely and responsibly ~ Edward Davey

Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like. ~ Edward Hirsch

But there is much that cannot go into books, and that is the loss with which I become increasingly concerned. ~ John Edward Williams

From the beginning, about the rude altar of the god, to the days of Goethe, of Leopardi, and of Victor Hugo, the poet is the leader in the dance of life; and the phrase by which we name his singularity, the poetic temperament, denotes the primacy of that passion in his blood with which the frame of other men is less richly charged. ~ George Edward Woodberry

I knew that if it ever got down to a choice between the Party and our traditional democratic structure I would fight the Party and our traditional democratic structure I would fight the Party to the bitter end. ~ Edward Dmytryk

Through our struggles and pain, we are being offered perseverance, the character of God. Hardships are intended to give us a spiritual makeover, "that we may share in his holiness" (Heb. 12:10). Therefore, when God encourages us to persevere, he is not stumbling for encouraging words. He is teaching us how to look like him. ~ Edward T. Welch

There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

It is incumbent on us diligently to remember that the kingdom of heaven was promised to the poor in spirit, and that minds afflicted by calamity and the contempt of mankind cheerfully listen to the divine promise of future happiness; while, on the contrary, the fortunate are satisfied with the possession of this world; and the wise abuse in doubt and dispute their vain superiority of reason and knowledge. ~ Edward Gibbon

One can think of a secretary actively operating a filing system, of a librarian actively cataloguing books, of a computer actively sorting out information. The mind however does not actively sort out information. The information sorts itself out and organises itself into patterns. The mind is passive. The mind only provides an opportunity for the information to behave in this way. The mind provides a special environment in which information can become self-organising. This special environment is a memory surface with special characteristics. ~ Edward De Bono

Rome wasn't deconstructed in a day. ~ Edward St. Aubyn

I want to make them [American Indians] live forever. It's such a big dream I can't see it all. ~ Edward S. Curtis

My son, Edward, at 4, to a neighbor boy who was being a pain in our backyard: "Oh, don't whine. my mom will throw you right out of here. ~ Cynthia Jo Mahaffey

The food of hope is meditative action. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I make it a point never to argue with people for whose opinion I have no respect. ~ Edward Gibbon

I wanted the monster back and that was plainly wrong. ~ Stephenie Meyer

Like our shadows, our wishes lengthen as our sun declines. ~ Edward Young

Let us now peruse our ancient authors, for out of the old fields must come the new corn. ~ Edward Coke

Analysis is simplifying, breaking down things into parts, picking out strands and elements. Analysis is comparing unknown things with things that are known. Analysis also involves picking out relationships and putting them back together as a whole. ~ Edward De Bono

Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans. ~ Edward Hoagland

Political freedom is, or ought to be, the best guaranty for the safety and continuance of spiritual, mental, and civil freedom. It is the combination of numbers to secure the liberty to each one. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it. ~ Edward Hirsch

No. When I was a girl, I wanted to be a pirate."
That brought up an all-too-pleasant image - Miss Marshall, the rich, dark red of her hair unbound and flying defiantly in the wind aboard a ship's deck. She'd wear a loose white shirt and pantaloons. He would definitely surrender.
"I am less shocked than you might imagine," Edward heard himself say. "Entirely unshocked."
She smiled in pleasure.
"A bloodthirsty cutthroat profession? Good thing you gave that up. It would never have suited you."
Her expression of pleasure dimmed.
"You'd have succeeded too easily," Edward continued, "and now you'd be sitting, bored as sin, atop a heap of gold too large to spend in one lifetime. Still, though, wouldn't it solve ever so many problems if you married a lord? James Delacey could never touch you again if you did. ~ Courtney Milan

The counsel on public relations is not an advertising man but he advocates for advertising where that is indicated. Very often he is called in by an advertising agency to supplement its work on behalf of a client. His work and that of the advertising agency do not conflict with or duplicate each other. ~ Edward Bernays

The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics. Math is a way to describe reality and figure out how the world works, a universal language that has become the gold standard of truth. In our world, increasingly driven by science and technology, mathematics is becoming, ever more, the source of power, wealth, and progress. Hence those who are fluent in this new language will be on the cutting edge of progress. ~ Edward Frenkel

To maintain the harmony of authority and obedience, to chastise the proud, to protect the weak, to reward the deserving, to banish vice and idleness from his dominions, to secure the traveller and merchant, to restrain the depredations of the soldier, to cherish the labors of the husbandman, to encourage industry and learning, and, by an equal and moderate assessment, to increase the revenue, without increasing the taxes, are indeed the duties of a prince ... ~ Edward Gibbon

In writing, they deem it irreverent to express the Supreme Being by any special name. He is symbolized by what may be termed the heiroglyphic of a pyramid, /. In prayer they address Him by a name which they deem too sacred to confide to a stranger, and I know it not. In conversation they generally use a periphrastic epithet, such as the All-Good. The letter V, symbolical of the inverted pyramid, where it is an initial, nearly always denotes excellence of power; as Vril, of which I have said so much; Veed, an immortal spirit; Veed-ya, immortality; ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I don't know what it is I'm doing. But it's not that. Despite all evidence to the contrary. ~ Edward Gorey

It was appointed by law in Athens, that the obsequies of the citizens who fell in battle should be performed at the public expense, and in the most honorable manner. ~ Edward Everett