Top 76 Quotes & Sayings by Dennis Hopper

I did a video with Mick Jagger down in Rio de Janeiro. But I played a video director, and that's the closest I've gotten to directing, except Bob Dylan came and had a few meetings with me about doing a video for him.

'Easy Rider' and 'The Last Movie' were the only films that I made totally on my own.

I think, at one point, I'd been in the five most expensive movies ever made - not that I had large parts in them. 'Apocalypse Now' was one.

I painted from the time I was five years old. I was going to be a painter, an actor, a director, and a writer.

I changed to Republican when Reagan became president because I wanted to see a change to years of Democrat-run Senate. And I voted Republican until Obama. I think he's terrific.

I don't believe in reading. I don't care about reading. It means nothing to me. I believe that by using your eyes and ears, you'll find everything that there is, and you don't have to read about it.

I did a lot of films in Europe, in Spain. I went to Australia and did 'Mad Dog Morgan'; I did 'Apocalypse Now' in the Philippines; I did Wim Wenders' film 'The American Friend' in Germany.

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.

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

The new generation doesn't know anything about me except for what they saw in' Easy Rider.'

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

I'm just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City, Kansas. And I always thought that acting was art, writing was art, music was art, painting was art, and I've tried to keep that cultural vibe to my life.

I don't enjoy being recognised. It's unpleasant.

Warner Bros. got into television very early, so I did a lot of television there. In the beginning, it was sort of okay to do television. But then it became this thing where movie actors didn't do television - they certainly didn't do commercials, because that just meant the end of your career.

I made my living as an actor, and I love acting, so I'm an actor. But that gets you in a lot of trouble in the art world.

When some people were going around being surf bums and tennis bums, I was being a gallery bum. I really liked galleries.

It's strange: I always try to do the best acting job I can do under the imaginary circumstances of my working position at any given time. But it's terrible when you know it's going bad, and you know it immediately. But you just have to still try to do the best job you can.

I think 'Easy Rider' might have been the first time that someone made a film using found music instead of an orchestral score. No one had really used found music in a movie before, except to play on radios or when someone was singing in a scene.

Victoria got very involved with the Obama campaign, and I stepped back out of it. I thought it was good for her to get some glory. It's hard being married to a celebrity.

My grandparents were from Kentucky - I'm related to Daniel Boone. He was my great-great-great uncle.

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

Society loves to put bubbles up there and pop them, and I resent it. I'd rather expose myself myself.

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

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.

Two chicks. I mean, ladies... ah - women, girls, whatever the term is. I'll get it. I've got it marked down somewhere.

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.

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.

I've been sober now for 18 years. With all the drugs, psychedelics and narcotics I did, I was [really] an alcoholic. Honestly, I only used to do cocaine so I could sober up and drink more. My last five years of drinking was a nightmare. I was drinking a half-gallon of rum with a fifth of rum on the side, in case I ran out, 28 beers a day, and three grams of cocaine just to keep me moving around. And I thought I was doing fine because I wasn't crawling around drunk on the floor.

I think not being a professional photographer was actually a blessing, because it allowed me to shoot things professional photographers wouldn't shoot, or wouldn't try or attempt to shoot without lights. So I did all my stuff natural and without lights.

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

[After Easy Rider] I couldn't get another movie, so I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years. I lived in Paris for a couple of years. I didn't take any photographs, and then I went to Japan and saw a Nikon used. I bought it, and I just started, like an alcoholic. I shot 300 rolls of film. That was the beginning of me starting again.

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.

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.

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.

... I'm sort of a nervous person with the camera, so I will just shoot arbitrarily until I can focus and compose something, and then I make a shot. So generally, in [the] proof sheets, there are only three or four really concentrated efforts to take a photograph. It's not like a professional kind of person who sets it up so every photograph looks really cool.

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.

I was always involved in art and when I went under contract at Warner Bros. at 18, it afforded me the possibility of never having to stop painting, never having to stop taking photographs and so on, and to actually live a cultural life.

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

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

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

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

Every time I go to Europe, I remember that James Dean never saw Europe, but yet I see his face everywhere. There's James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe - windows of the Champs Elysees, discos in the south of Spain, restaurants in Sweden, t-shirts in Moscow. My life was confused and disoriented for years by his passing. My sense of destiny destroyed - the great films he would have directed, the great performances he would have given, the great humanitarian he would have become, and yet, he's the greatest actor and star I have ever known.

I made a picture called Super Mario Bros., and my six-year-old son at the time - he's now 18 - he said, 'Dad I think you're probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in Super Mario Bros?' And I said, 'Well Henry, I did that so you could have shoes,' and he said, 'Dad, I don't need shoes that badly.'

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.

I couldn't get a job acting all the time and there were down periods where I could take photographs or paint. I got into a lot of trouble when I was young, from making two films with James Dean, watching him work and then him dying and thinking I could turn down work. There was a big difference, he was a star and I wasn't. So I got in a lot of trouble and was essentially banned from Hollywood.

Jimmy [Dean] was the most talented and original actor I ever saw work. He was also a guerrilla artist who attacked all restrictions on his sensibility. Once he pulled a switchblade and threatened to murder his director. I imitated his style in art and in life. It got me in a lot of trouble.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

As an actor, you have no control really.

The alcohol was awful. I was a terrible alcoholic. I mean, people used to ask how much drugs I did. I said, 'I only do drugs so I can drink more'. I was doing the coke so I could drink more. I mean, I don't know any other reason. I'd start drinking in the morning. I'd drink all day long.

I am just a middle-class farm boy from Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers. I thought painting, acting, directing and photography were all part of being an artist. I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It's not been a bad life.

You want to hear about insanity? I was found running naked through the jungles in Mexico. At the Mexico City airport, I decided I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing on takeoff. My body... my liver... okay, my brain... went.

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

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

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