Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience.

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.

One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.