Dennis Hopper Quotes

The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad.

It takes more than going down to the video store and renting "Easy Rider" to be a rebel.

I was very shy, and it was a lot easier for me to communicate if I had a camera between me and other people.

Like all artists, I want to cheat death a little and contribute something to the next generation.

People keep asking me, 'What evil lurks in you to play such bad characters?' There is no evil in me, I just wear tight underwear.

Just because it happened to you, doesn't mean it's interesting.

Art is a bad word in Hollywood. You use art too many times and they show you the elevator and then your name is taken off the parking lot.

My whole written history is one big lie! I mean, I can't even believe my history.

In a world where the dead have returned to life, the word" trouble' loses much of its meaning.

Work is fun to me. All those years of being an actor and a director and not being able to get a job - two weeks is too long to not know what my next job will be.

Independent films in this country are in the same position. Miramax and Fine Line are not independent - they're with Disney! Come on. Or they're with Warner Brothers. They're all with somebody.

I think of [my photographs] as found paintings because I don't crop them, I don't manipulate them or anything. So they're like found objects to me.

When we're out of the eighties, the nineties are gonna make the sixties look like the fifties!

You're like a turd that won't flush.

For most of my life, I wasn't on the Left.

You know, the history of California art doesn't start until about 1961, and that's when these photographs start. I mean, we have no history out here.

Easy Rider' was never a motorcycle movie to me. A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.

The reality of things going on around me is more interesting than the fantasies of the world I work in.

I should have been dead ten times over. I've thought about that a lot. I believe in miracles. It's an absolute miracle that I'm still around.

The best and only authentic book written on the sixties underground.

I've always been doing some sort of art. I started off, when I was very young, painting.

I used to have to wear a gas mask to school when I was a kid because of the dust. I would tell people that the first light I saw was in a movie theater, because the sun was just a little glow.

To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.

Well, it's not just money. I consider myself establishment right now. I'm borderline establishment, I'm hanging on by my toenails - but I'm establishment.

I've been a Republican since Reagan. I voted for Bush and his father. I don't tell a lot of people, because I live in a city where somebody who voted for Bush is really an outcast.

There are moments that I've had some real brilliance, you know. But I think they are moments. And sometimes, in a career, moments are enough.

As an actor, you have no control really.

Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you either love somebody or you hate them.

I'm still around artists. I don't have anymore wall space. And I don't have the money to collect anymore, the prices are outrageous.

I was a Shakespearean actor, I had preconceived ideas, line readings - everything was a gesture, everything was conscious.

Photography and painting, all of that fed into my directing eventually.

I was reading a lot of Thomas Jefferson at the time, and Jefferson said that every 20 years, if one party has stayed in power, it's your obligation as an American to vote the other party in.

I was an abstract expressionist before I had seen any abstract expressionist paintings. I started when I was a kid and continued just doing abstract stuff all through high school.

I never really made any money and it certainly cost me more to take photographs than I got for them.

In Method acting, you can't have preconceived ideas. You have to live in the moment. You have to keep yourself open.

I wanted to be an actor. I decided when I was very young, when I first saw movies, that I wanted to be an actor.

Seven of those days were pretty good. The eighth day was the bad one.