Nobody really wants to be alone. People need people.

If you want to be a creative person, then you’re gonna have to be creative in how you put your career together. There isn’t a path. Part of the creativity is making your path.

I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.

I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.

The people that I photographed allowed me to photograph them because they didn't want to be alone, and the truth is I didn't want to be alone making the pictures.

Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.

I'm a project-based photographer; I think in narrative terms, the way a writer thinks of a book, or a filmmaker a film.

[Photography is] very related to poetry. It's suggestive and fragmentary and unsatisfying in a lot of ways. It's as much about what you leave out as what you put in.

For me, the act of photography is all about discovery and finding new things.

For me, photography is as much about the way I respond to the subject as it is about the subject itself.

Photography, for me, is a lot like web surfing in real life.

Lord I thank you for the grace to live through every day.

I stood in the library admiring the huge book collection. There was something inherently calming about being surrounded by books, even their smell and texture was comforting.

Let tomorrow cross its own rivers.

What you want to do is, you want to get away from people being afraid to show their work, which is the first thing, because they don't want to be shot down.

Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.

I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho.

I do think any modern storyteller is influenced by the stories we all grow up with and become familiar with, our shared cultural narratives.

America is very decentralized in how it supports the humanities, unlike European countries where virtually everything stems from the central government.

The wise coach takes all the heat when his players lose, and gives them all the credit when they win.

Everybody should have a fair deal; everybody should have the chance to life in this world. If we were evolved as human beings, we would hopefully be able to alleviate suffering in the world.