Quote

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.

Dennis Hopper

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Dennis Hopper
Age: 74 †
Born: 1936
Born: May 17
Died: 2010
Died: May 29
Actor
Art Collector
Artist
Character Actor
Film Actor
Film Director
Filmmaker
Painter
Photographer
Printmaker
Screenwriter
Sculptor
Dodge City
Kansas
Dennis Lee Hopper
Work
Actor
Talented
Guerrillas
Life
Style
Threatened
Restrictions
Trouble
Originals
Restriction
Actors
Original
Dean
Artist
Director
Attacked
Art
Murder
Jimmy
Switchblade
Also
Directors
Pulled
Guerrilla
Ever
Saws
Sensibility
Imitated

More quotes by Dennis Hopper

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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.
Dennis Hopper
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Photography and painting, all of that fed into my directing eventually.
Dennis Hopper
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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.
Dennis Hopper
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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.
Dennis Hopper
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I was a Shakespearean actor, I had preconceived ideas, line readings - everything was a gesture, everything was conscious.
Dennis Hopper
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Banks wont even loan each other money, everybody's going broke, and here we are inside here, these people are going to be out on the street selling apples and pencils and they're still going to be buying paintings for this money, so I don't know what's going on in this world.
Dennis Hopper
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My whole written history is one big lie! I mean, I can't even believe my history.
Dennis Hopper
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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.
Dennis Hopper
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The best and only authentic book written on the sixties underground.
Dennis Hopper
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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.
Dennis Hopper
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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.
Dennis Hopper
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I've always been doing some sort of art. I started off, when I was very young, painting.
Dennis Hopper
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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.
Dennis Hopper
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You know, this is such a rich time that we've just been involved in, and there's really a job now for historians. Film is still very young. This is the first hundred years of filmmaking. So I think it's important that we have some sense of history and continuity. Especially in film.
Dennis Hopper
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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.
Dennis Hopper
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The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad.
Dennis Hopper
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Just because it happened to you, doesn't mean it's interesting.
Dennis Hopper
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I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.
Dennis Hopper
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When I was about 14. I saw my first mountain. I saw the ocean for the first time. I remember thinking that that ocean looked very similar to our wheat fields. I didn't know what I thought I would see when I looked out at the ocean, but I thought I'd see something different.
Dennis Hopper
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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.
Dennis Hopper