“I don’t see myself as a documentary photographer. I am more drawn to the image itself, rather than to the description of a scene. And, anyway, every image only halfway represents reality, whereas the other half is rather, more or less, fulfilling our imagination.”

I like to be flexible in the way I take pictures. I do not use a tripod, and I move around in the crowd, of which I am myself part….

I try to preserve the dynamics of the street, and my way of using the camera tries to approximate as much as possible the way we see: focusing on details, opening up to wider angles, and composing all these very short, fragmented impressions into a larger mental picture.

My work doesn’t speak about individuals (it’s not portraiture in the traditional sense), it tries to speak about life in general in cities of the West – which is where I live and what I understand.

At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person’s skin.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.

Or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

I don’t feel any pressure from fans. But I’m always in some kind of state of emotional turmoil. I would not describe myself as happy-go-lucky. That’s not to say that I’m not happy.

And when you clear away the cobwebs of the description of every job in the world, at the bottom of that job is service.

Worrying that banning flag desecration would inhibit free speech reveals a misunderstanding of the flag’s fundamental nature.

The treasure I have found cannot be described in words, the mind cannot conceive of it.

Love is your job description – no matter what you do for a living. If you ever feel unsure of what you’re supposed to do in a situation, here’s a good rule of thumb: always do what leads to greater love.

The purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it.