“Oh, yes, I was a great retoucher. A retoucher is an esthetic surgeon !”

Just as I work with paints, brushes, and canvas, I work with the light, pieces of glass and chemistry.

Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

Lipstick is the red badge of courage.

There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love.

All critics should be assassinated.

A certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realization of this idea.

My works were designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify and inspire reflection.

If the affairs of the world were put in the hands of the screwball artists, it couldn’t be in a worse state than it is now !

Speaking of nudes, I have always had a great fondness for this subject, both in my paintings and in my photos, and I must admit, not for purely artistic reasons.

Reality is fabricated out of desire.

In the same spirit, when the automobile arrived, there were those that declared the horse to be the most perfect form of locomotion.

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

I never knew what I was doing until I was done.

I believe in the relation between photography and music; And thats my inspiration.

If the affairs of the world were put in the hands of the screwball artists, it couldn’t be in a worse state than it is now !

Thanks to my effort in the last 40 years, there has been more paper and film wasted.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands – someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

I met the surgeon general – he offered me a cigarette.

You can teach somebody how to be a brain surgeon, but you cannot teach them how to walk on a stage and make people laugh.

Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.

My brother is the youngest member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. And I wouldn’t let him cut my nails.

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.

I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.

No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.