I was really fixated when I was a child. Again my mother was just talking to me about this, about how I would how try to get details exactly right. I guess I was always very persistent.

My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear.

Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures

It's about finding meaning through light. I'm always interested in tensions. A primary one is the collision between the familiar and the strange.

I really love that dynamic between beauty and sadness...theres always these moments of quiet alienation, the sense of disconnect, but also, these moments of possibility.

I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire

What the artist attempts to do is to try and tell a story. Attempting to give physical expression to a story that's internal.

It is really important to have an obsessive need to construct something, to understand something from your own experience.

I think that, in a sense, there's something about photography in general that we could associate with memory, or the past, or childhood.

The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst.

My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery.

A steward in the above scripture is a servant who serves.

Wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort, is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.

I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing.

You might want to lie down, " Magnus advised. "I find that it helps when the crushing sense of horrible realization sets in.

Life is about opportunities, creating them and embracing them, and for me, that was the Olympic dream. That's what defined me. That was my bliss.

Do you know how hard it is to kill 30 million people? It's a logistical nightmare.

Writing is the greatest thing that can happen to a human being. It's the best.

If I knew I was going to win, I probably wouldn't even fight.

Tea-shops were to become my favourite haunts in England.