Top 15 Edward Hopper Quotes

[on the question 'Why selecting certain subjects over others':] I do not exactly know, unless it is that I believe them [his chosen subjects] to be the best mediums for a synthesis of my inner experience.

At Gloucester [village at the sea where Hopper with his wife Jo had married and stayed during the summer of 1924] when everyone else would be painting ships and the waterfront I'd just go around looking at houses (watercolor: 'Haskell's house', 1924). It is a solid looking town. The roofs are very bold, the cornices bolder. The dormers cast very positive shadows. The sea captain influence I guess – the boldness of ships.

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.

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

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

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

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

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. [Hopper then proceeded to inform Kuh that his work contained no social content whatsoever!]

[about his painting 'Approaching a CityWell' Hopper painted in 1946:] 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. There is a certain fear and anxiety and a great visual interest in the things that one sees coming into a great city. I think that's about all I can say about it.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting. 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. It's very simple.. .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.. .I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.

They are in a high key, somewhat like impressionism or a modified impressionism. I think I'm still an impressionist.

Just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express a thought in painting is. Thought is fluid. What you put on canvas is concrete, and it tends to direct the thought. The more you punt on canvas the more you lose control of the thought. I’ve never been able to paint what I set out to paint.

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 a woman looking out to see if the weather is good enough to hang out her wash.

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