“Being disabled gave me an immense advantage. People are kinder to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole and secure.”

go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.

To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

The people who are garrulous and wear their heart on their sleeve and tell you everything, that’s one kind of person, but the fellow who’s hiding behind a tree and hoping you don’t see him is the fellow that you’d better find out why.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don’t know is how to photograph affluence – whose other face is poverty.

Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon… We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.

Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.

You know there are moments such as these when time stands still and all you do is hold your breath and hope it will wait for you.

I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were–their pride, their strength, their spirit.

Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

… it came to me that what I had to do was to take pictures and concentrate upon people, only people, all kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didn’t.

It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine–something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.

You don’t know anything about respect; you don’t know anything about being faithful and loyal to your girlfriend.

We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

No human being is unimportant. My inspiration comes in opening opportunities that all alike may be free to live life to the fullest.

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.