“One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.”

No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

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.

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.

Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life’s artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

The artist draws the people. The whole idea is for people to dig themselves, just mingle around meeting different other people. That’s cool.

I don’t think there’s anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards – in the life of an artist.

The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration.

That’s just a part of being an artist: you can’t write great stuff all the time, because if you did, then you’d be inhuman. The human side of people is that sometimes they fail.