When you are doing a lot of hard fast field work, it's a physical necessity to forget every day. You can't try to remember it in any continuity. You get so burdened if you try to do it the other way. You can't dictate to your material... We found our way in, slid in on the edges. We used our hunches. And it was hard, hard living.

Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.

Being disabled gave me an immense advantage. People are kinder to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole and secure.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.

I've never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning - but some phase of photographer I've always been.

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.