I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.

If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn't it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?

I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed

Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.

i think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people

If I have a spreadsheet that can, whatever, turn soup cans into gold, wouldn't I deserve an office?

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

What do we feel when we look at a good photograph? We just want to be there, right at the exact moment that photo taken!

I got involved in improv comedy. It settled me down when I was getting wild. I was sort of an evil teenager smashing up my cars and drinking and driving, let's just say, a lot.

I acted my heart out.

I think Russian people are learning that democracy is not an alien thing; it's not a western invention.

The gardener's work is never at at end; it begins with the year, and continues to the next: he prepares the ground, and then he sows it; after that he plants, and then he gathers the fruits.

The infant mortality rates are insanely high. The obesity epidemic is on the rise. It is all related.

And eyes disclosed what eyes alone could tell.

I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going to be the way I made my living, because the form was dying commercially.