For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody - it's a caress… I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.

I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.

My desire is to preserve the sense of people’s lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I want the people in my pictures to stare back.

I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show me how much I've lost.

Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.

I knew from a very early age, that what I saw on tv had nothing to do with real life. So I wanted to make a record of real life. That included having a camera with me at all times.

I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.

My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them.

I think the wrong things are kept private

My work shows the beauty in so many different kinds of people because I never photograph anyone who I don't think is beautiful. I never take an intentionally mean picture.

I usually work really instinctively and it's afterwards that I think about what it means. I don't know consciously that I have these themes that run through my work.

If you don't read books, and if you don't get consumed by the physical and moral life of men and women in fiction and history, too many facets of yourself may never come into being.

The true wealth of a nation is not their natural resources but their achievements in education.

What we think and love persistently will be what we become.

As a kid, you get to the stage where you realise the gender barriers that exist in society and what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do.

Wise men say, only fools rush in. Wise men are so slow.

I've always been able to survive by writing, though.

With freedom goes responsibility, a responsibility that can only be met by the individual himself.

I'm really bad at being nonviolent.

It has never been more critical that a leader step forward to accelerate our understanding of cancer - and champion the effort to finally defeat it. That leader will be the Duke Cancer Institute.

Modesty is policy, no less than virtue.