“In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.”

Photographers are always imposing.

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting’.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

whatever doesn’t kill you leaves scars.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.

Don’t educate your children to be rich. Educate them to be happy, so they know the value of things, not the price.

I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.

Are you so busy fighting you cannot see your own ship has set sail?

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it.