“Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.”

The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?

It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.

The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

I think I’m better behind the camera than I am in front.

Once you develop a comfort level with someone, that translates on camera.

It is important to understand what are you trying to capture with a camera. What you want to use this tool for. It helps to begin to search for and concentrate on thematic photography.

I began working with a family camera. It was called a Kodak Autographic, which was one of those things where you flopped it open and pulled out the bellows. And I’ve been at it ever since – I’ve never stopped.

The camera can capture thought in a way that’s quite surprising and shocking. You can become very simple and minimal in your work and communicate a lot with just a finger or an eyebrow, or a look, or a glance.

I’m not an equipment nut. I tend to use whatever’s at hand. I have several cameras, of course, but I’m not emotional about any of them

The only way to kill death is through photography.

I’m quite comfortable looking at myself in movies, probably because I’ve been doing it for so long, since I was a kid. So I sort of watched myself grow up and go through adolescence, like, basically on camera.