As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon.

There are photographs that I don’t take now, that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.

Different members of different cultures will think that some things are beautiful.

Any artist that's involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do.

I don't photograph any two people who are remotely the same.

When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed consent question was answerable.

That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.

All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in.

The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.

I'm the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no errand for me.

I found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the raid on my apartment happened.

The grief of widowhood, of losing a husband and only to be harassed by his brothers, remained pressed on her.

Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago

I'm lucky that most of the time I'm on location in amazing places. Most of the time, I don't need holidays, I just stop working.

Our kids will never have to remember things, because it's all in pictures. Want to remember your fourth birthday? There'll be video of it on your phone.

Being willing to delay pleasure for a greater result is a sign of maturity.

My heroes are people like Philip Levine, who is simply like a god to me, as a writer. And he is a very good man, too.

The only thing that I have done that is not mitigated by luck, diminished by good fortune, is that I persisted, and other people gave up.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

The influence (for good or ill) of Plato's work is immeasurable. Western thought, one might say, has been Platonic or anti-Platonic, but hardly ever non-Platonic.

Writing checks for charities is necessary and important. But it can't compare with corporal works of mercy, which are infinitely greater.