“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”

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.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was ‘interesting’.

To me, music is art and fashion is art, but fame? Fame isn’t art, but the person you become when you’re famous – your alter ego – that’s art.

The increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.

Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

It is hard to separate the art from the artist.

Let your art reflect your soul.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Art is my life and my life is art.