“Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.”

An ametuer is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn’t mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.

Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.

Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.

Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it’s called documentary, which I suppose is all right … We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.

Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.

It may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

I confess that Roy [Stryker] was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn’t understand at the time.

I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.

All art is based on nonconformity … Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.

We know that Russia was involved in hacking our democracy.

It’s funny how insomnia has a way of hauling faded memories up from the cellar of the mind.

We are trying to do as much of this as we can in the public eye transparently.

It makes you feel cheap and guilty when you didn’t do a thing in the world to kindle the dull burn in your veins or the sting in your eyes.

Stay in the Word. The moment you start letting go of that, you’re on the road to compromise.

When you do what you want, not what you wish…’ said the first raven. ‘When you no longer seek your reflection in others’ eyes…’ said the second.

When I was a small boy, old people used to squat down to my eye level and ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, to which my answer was invariably, “a pirate.”

But just as we begin to enter on the history of physical changes going on before our eyes, and in which we ourselves bear a part,