“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.”

To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

The best way to go into an unknown territory is to go in ignorant, ignorant as possible, with your mind wide open, as wide open as possible and not having to meet anyone else’s requirement but your own.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can’t see watches you.

No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.

To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.

Photography today appears to be in a state of flight… The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.

Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I’m very glad therefore you’ve been a part of it.

Sensual is everything that refers to the delight of the senses. And that’s what artists do, is stimulate the senses in any possible way.

You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it – low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion – and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national.

Being gritty doesn’t mean not showing pain or pretending everything is O.K. In fact, when you look at healthy and successful and giving people, they are extraordinarily meta-cognitive. They’re able to say things like, ‘Dude, I totally lost my temper this morning.’ That ability to reflect on yourself is signature to grit.

Everything good and bad comes from your own mind. To find something beyond the mind is impossible.

The more I paint the more I like everything.

But when modern absolutism arose, it laid claim to everything on behalf of the sovereign power….

Everything sacred, nothing sacred.