If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was 33 years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography.

I am interested in the nature of things. The nature of something is quite different from the way it looks.

I am an expressionist and by that I mean that I'm not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs.

One of the marvelous things about film is that if you expose it long enough you're going to get a picture.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn't tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.

I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look like and think it's impossible to really know what people are.