The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.

What do you think I'm a professor of? The little finger? (On offers of honorary doctorates.)

There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.