My style hasn't changed much in all these sixty years. I still use, most of the time, existing light and try not to push people around. I have to be as much a diplomat as a photographer. People don't often take me seriously because I carry so little equipment and make so little fuss... I never carried a lot of equipment. My motto has always been, "Keep it simple".

Yes, I sold buttons to earn living. But I took pictures to keep on living. Pictures are my life – as necessary as eating or breathing.

All photographers have to do, is find and catch the story-telling moment.

I see pictures all the time. I could stay for hours and watch a raindrop.

Today's photographers think differently. Many can't see real light anymore. They think only in terms of strobe - sure, it all looks beautiful but it's not really seeing. If you have the eyes to see it, the nuances of light are already there on the subject's face. If your thinking is confined to strobe light sources, your palette becomes very mean - which is the reason I photograph only in available light.

I always prefer photographing in available light – or Rembrandt-light I like to call it – so you get the natural modulations of the face. It makes a more alive, real, and flattering portrait.

I will be remembered when I'm in heaven. People won't remember my name, but they will know the photographer who did that picture of that nurse being kissed by the sailor at the end of World War II. Everybody remembers that.