The full weight and mystery of your art rests upon your relationship to your subject matter.

How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with.

I'm fond of implied narratives, oblique angles, and leaving a little room for the viewer to finish a picture.

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

I don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments.

The raw materials of photography are light and time and memory.

Sharpness is overrated.

I want to be made better personally. That is the gig.

Your ideas come out of the way you conduct your life.

I don't think science is necessarily incompatible with mystical or spiritual sensibilities. I often weigh them equally in my thinking, which sometimes finds itself into the work.

You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.

He had the red serviette tucked into his t-shirt at the neck which made me laugh. He hadn’t done this since our third date when I had told him off for his bad manners.

How could you get mad at someone who neither needed to attack nor was at all worried about being able to defend? It was like getting mad at Switzerland.

Sometimes it's harder to say sorry, then it is to say goodbye.

I always had to genuinely like the actors I worked with and use my enthusiasm and vision to give them confidence to push their creativity and their humor.

While growing up, I always had to depend on foreign authors for page-turners. I think of myself as a commercial writer, and my job is simple to entertain you.

It was my father who taught me to value myself.

Beware of your definition of success: If it has more to do with what other people think of you than it does with what you know of your own abilities, you may be confusing applause with achievement.

Failure leaves open a door for us to try, and try again.

All hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will

The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property.