I already know what things look like - I don't want description. People believe in appearances, and I don't believe in appearances at all.

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.

Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

All good work has magic in it, and addresses the mind in a subtle way.

If I was concerned about being accepted, I would have been doing Ansel Adams lookalikes, because that was easily accepted. Everything I did was never accepted...but luckily for me, my interest in the subject and my passion for the subject took me to the point that I wasn't wounded by that, and eventually, people came around to me.

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.