Edward Hopper quotes - page 2

Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker, renowned for his evocative depictions of modern American life. His works often capture themes of solitude, urban landscapes, and the quiet moments of everyday existence. He is celebrated for his unique ability to convey mood and atmosphere through light and composition. Here are 72 of his quotes:

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.

Edward Hopper

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

Edward Hopper

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

Edward Hopper

I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.

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

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

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.

Edward Hopper

I use a retouching varnish which is made in France, Libert, and that's all the varnish I use.

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

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. I find any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom.

Edward Hopper

The technical obstacles of painting perhaps dictate this form. It derives also from the limitations of personality, and such may be the simplifications that I have attempted.

Edward Hopper

[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.

Edward Hopper

Originality is neither a matter of inventiveness nor method, it is the essence of personality.

Edward Hopper

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

Edward Hopper

It takes a long time for an idea to strike.

Edward Hopper

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.

Edward Hopper

I do not know why I chose one subject rather than another unless I believe them to be the best synthesis of my inner experience.

Edward Hopper

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

Edward Hopper

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.

Edward Hopper

The whole answer is there on the canvas.

Edward Hopper

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.... the entry of the bull into the ring however is very beautiful; his surprise and the first charges he makes are very pretty.

Edward Hopper