“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.”

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.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

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.

Martial arts is for defense. It’s not for attacking. So when people are fighting, always, always, defend.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.

Her beautiful smile, her soft, tender heart; she’s an actual, walking, work of art.

Let the moon teach you the art of being beautiful and lonely at the same time.

The basis of art is change in the universe.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

Poetry is the art of truth.