I love chaos.... It's the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.

All art is based on non-conformity.

I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.

How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.

Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.

I confess that Roy [Stryker] was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time.

I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.