“Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can’t see watches you.”

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

The best way to go into an unknown territory is to go in ignorant, ignorant as possible, with your mind wide open, as wide open as possible and not having to meet anyone else’s requirement but your own.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.

To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight… The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.

You go into a room and you know where you’re welcome; you know where you’re unwelcome.

Life is not a spectator sport.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.

Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody’s encouraged to want less, you’ll end up with less.

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering “who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?”

Theater is like boxing – having the audience ringside. It’s instant gratification. Or horrification.

If the people in the audience are talking, you’re being ignored. If the people are gazing at you, you’ve got something they want to hear.