Top 35 Edward Hopper Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Edward Hopper

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

— Edward Hopper

3. “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.”

— Edward Hopper

4. “Well, I have a very simple method of painting.”

— Edward Hopper

5. “My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.”

— Edward Hopper

6. “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. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.”

— Edward Hopper

7. “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.”

— Edward Hopper

8. “I think that zinc white has a property of scaling and cracking.”

— Edward Hopper

9. “Maybe I am not very human – all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

— Edward Hopper

10. “More of me comes out when I improvise.”

— Edward Hopper

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

— Edward Hopper

12. “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.”

— Edward Hopper

13. “In general it can be said that a nation’s art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.”

— Edward Hopper

14. “When I don’t feel in the mood for painting I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge!”

— Edward Hopper

15. “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.”

— Edward Hopper

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

— Edward Hopper

17. “The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.”

— Edward Hopper

18. “So many people say painting is fun. I don’t find it fun at all. It’s hard work for me.”

— Edward Hopper

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19. “There is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house.”

— Edward Hopper

20. “The only real influence I’ve ever had was myself.”

— Edward Hopper

21. “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

22. “I use a retouching varnish which is made in France, Libert, and that’s all the varnish I use.”

— Edward Hopper

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

— Edward Hopper

24. “Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature’s phenomena before it can again become great.”

— Edward Hopper

25. “Methods are transient: personality is enduring.”

— Edward Hopper

26. “I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.”

— Edward Hopper

27. “I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.”

— Edward Hopper

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

— Edward Hopper

29. “The question of the value of nationality in art is perhaps unsolvable.”

— Edward Hopper

30. “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.”

— Edward Hopper

31. “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.”

— Edward Hopper

32. “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

33. “I once got a little camera to use for details of architecture and so forth but the photo was always so different from the perspective the eye gives, I gave it up.”

— Edward Hopper

34. “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.”

— Edward Hopper

35. “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

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

— Edward Hopper

37. “In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.”

— Edward Hopper