Quotes by Edward Hopper

• What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.
• No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
• Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.
• The only real influence I've ever had was myself.
• The question of the value of nationality in art is perhaps unsolvable.
• 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.
• There is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house.
• 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.
• 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.
• Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.
• 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.
• I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.
• I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.
• Well, I have a very simple method of painting.
• I use a retouching varnish which is made in France, Libert, and that's all the varnish I use.
• I think that zinc white has a property of scaling and cracking.
• 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.
• 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.
• My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.
• I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.
• More of me comes out when I improvise.
• If I had the energy, I would have done it all over the county.
• If the picture needs varnishing later, I allow a restorer to do that, if there's any restoring necessary.
• 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.
• If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.
• In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.
• In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.
• It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method.
• 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.