The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.

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.

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

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.

We're all a blemished spirit full of censurable faults

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.

O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible, and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.

Consider the lilies of the field how they grow they neither toil nor spin yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.

Success is just happiness. When you are happy, that is success.

You have a choice every moment of the day to open yourself up. And when you do that, it opens the channels of love.

When people are alive they love, when they die, they keep loving. If love ends when person dies, that is not real love

I always tell people, you know, [J.F.Kennedy's] grandfather was born in Ireland and he was Irish-Catholic, and I thought, so maybe I could someday try do what he did.

I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.