In a painting no one complains that the subject is posed, but everybody complains about what looks posed in a photograph. Except, I've found that if I go very close in to the face, then the posed expression no longer exists. The face becomes a landscape of the lakes of the eyes and the hills of the nose and the valley of the cleft of the chin.

When I go to photograph somebody, they say, "What do you want me to do?" Those are the most frightening words in the English language. I want to say, "Please, go over into good light and do something unusual.

I was photographing the photographer Brassaï. He had very prominent eyes, like a frog's. As I focused my lens, he brought his hand up and pretended to focus his eye. It was a joke, but it added mystery to the picture. There's a sense of action in a very small world. Or with Allen Ginsberg there were people smoking cigarettes and in the smoke there's a sense of motion. It makes much out of very little.

Teachers don't work in the summer, and photographers don't shoot in in the middle of the day.

Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture's true beauty.

Perishability in a photograph is important in a picture. If a photograph looks perishable we say, "Gee, I'm glad I have that moment."

When I teach a class I often give the assignment: Photograph someone you love. I ask people to do this so they have a subject about whom they have feelings, a subject that is more than a model, or an object, or a shape, or an idea. In this way, they can judge the result not only by its technical success, but also by how well it describes their feelings.