Quotes by Edward Hopper

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

“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.”

“More of me comes out when I improvise.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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 ha...”

“The people here in fact seem to live in the streets, which are alive from morning until night, not as they are in New York with that never-ending determination for the 'long-green', but with a plea...”

“I do not believe there is another city on earth so beautiful as Paris, nor another people with such an appreciation of the beautiful as the French.”

“Everyone goes to the 'Grands-Boulevards' 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 a...”

“The killing of the horses [a bullfight in Madrid, he visited in June 1910] by the bull is very horrible, much more so as they have no chance to escape and are ridden up to the bull to be butchered....”

“It seemed awful crude and raw here when I got back [after his return from his third and last trip to Europe, in 1910]. It took me ten years to get over Europe.”

“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...”

“I was always interested in architecture, but the editors [of the magazines who demanded these subjects for the illustrations of Hopper] wanted people waving with their arms.”

“So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. B...”

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

“If this end is unattainable, so, it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man's activities.”