“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

Photographers are always imposing.

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting’.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

whatever doesn’t kill you leaves scars.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

The moment I am aware that I am aware, I am not aware. Awareness means the observer is not.

I am learning the importance of living in the moment.

People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

Love ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.

It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes into the foreground.