Edward Hopper Quotes

It is true that the Impressionists perhaps gave a more faithful representation of nature through their discoveries in out-of-door painting. But that they increased their statute as artists by so doing is controversial.. .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.

Did I say that? You're making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view she's just looking out the window, just looking out the window.

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

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.

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

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

I am after ME [his response on the question what he was after, in his sober painting in 1963 'Sun in an empty room'.

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

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.

The idea [for his painting 'Room in New York', he painted in 1932] had been in my mind a long time before I painted it. It was suggested by glimpses of lighted interiors seen as I walked along city streets at night, probably near the district where I live [Washington Square, New York] although it’s no particular street or house, but is really a synthesis of many impressions.

Paris is a very graceful and beautiful city, almost too formal and sweet to 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.

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

The only real influence I have had was myself.

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

Sloan [American colleague artist who started his art by making etchings, c. 1920] not having been abroad [in contrary to Hopper himself], has seen these things with a truer and fresher eye than most..The hard early training has given to Sloan a facility and a power of invention that the pure painter seldom achieves.