The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

Paintings can make you cry and it's just **colored dirt**.

I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another.In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.

The camera is objective. When it records a face it can't make any hierarchical decisions about a nose being more important than a cheek. The camera is not aware of what it is looking at. It just gets it all down.

It's like a magic well. You think you know everything about [a] photograph, you think you've gotten everything out of it, and all of a sudden I see things in it I'd never seen before.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

The thing that interests me about photography, and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.