Throughout his life Hopper stated that his art was not an exact transcription of nature; it was a condensation of many scenes and impressions. "I'm always at a loss when asked for facts about any of my pictures or to describe how any one of them came to be made," he told Lloyd Goodrich. "It is so often a very complicated mental process that would not interest people." Hopper's art depended on memory as well as inspiration. He searched for a typical scene, not a unique one, and found he frequently had to cull from a number of experiences and reduce them to a common denominator to make his art. The real world was often too unique, and a specific locale frequently did not render the commonality of the true "American scene," a term he later learned to hate because it became associated in many people's minds with a nostalgic and Romantic view of the world. His description to Lloyd Goodrich of the origins of Room in New York (1932) underscores his method of creation: