You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

Get it out of your historic head.

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

...There are too many people studying it [photography] now who are never going to make it. You can't give them a formula for making it. You have to have it in you first, you don't learn it. The seeing eye is the important thing.

I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There's always someone who doesn't like it.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.