The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.
There's always a threat surrounding the things you love
Photography isn't about seeing, it's about feeling. If I don't have some kind of feeling for what I'm shooting, how can I expect the person who looks at it to feel anything?
I have been manipulated, and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don't practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: “I didn't kill that man on that photograph, I didn't starve that child. That's why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.
I only use a camera like I use a toothbrush. It does the job.
Photography is the truth if it’s being handled by a truthful person.
Seeing, looking at what others cannot bear to see is what my life is all about.
Once you accept that perfection is just a goal, screwing up isn't so hard to handle. Each misstep is still a step, another lesson learned, another opportunity to get it right the next time.
I've never run into a guy who could win at the top level in anything today and didn't have the right attitude, didn't give it everything he had, at least while he was doing it; wasn't prepared and didn't have the whole program worked out.
It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.
I liked getting up at 4 in the morning, driving on the freeway, and going in and stocking shelves and laughing with the stock clerks.