“The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”

By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.

What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.

To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.

You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.

You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.

A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.

Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected.

… photography, like all camera-made images such as film and video, effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A photograph appears to be self-generated – as though it had created itself.

I grew up in the ’60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn’t that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera.

I have received the digital camera as a blessing. It has really changed my life as a filmmaker, because I don’t use my camera anymore as a camera. I don’t feel it as a camera.

The theater and film, they’re like two completely different mediums.

I was trained in the theater, so I really learned a lot about how to work with the camera, just technically speaking, it’s been an amazing learning curve.