“Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.”

I’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.

The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward.

Personal style, be it that of Michelangelo, or that of Tintoretto… has always been that peculiar personal rapport which has developed between an artist and his medium.

Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material… so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.

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.

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.

A refuge, a magical world where anyone can go, where all kinds of people can come together, and anything can happen. We are limited only by our imaginations.

My overall knowledge of football specifications, the overall process that happens on game day with the footballs is very limited.

This fraternity… makes it possible… for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.

I suspect the debate over the ethics will be much more heated than the debate over steroids in baseball or any other sport, where the use is limited to a select group of freakish athletes.

I believe it is urgent to begin now, before we are constrained by a totally controlled society monitoring limited resources on the planet. Now is the time to establish our extraterrestrial base in freedom; later it may be under the coercion of necessity.

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.