I'm a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can't help myself.

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

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.

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.

I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.

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

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