It never seemed important to me that my photos be published. It's important that I take them. There were periods where I didn't have money, and I would imagine that someone would come to me and say: 'Here is money, you can go do your photography, but you must not show it.' I would have accepted right away. On the other hand, if someone had come to me saying: 'Here is money to do your photography, but after your death it must be destroyed,' I would have refused.

I don't like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.

I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.

If I am dissatisfied, it's simply because good photos are few and far between. A good photo is a miracle.

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer."

The biggest lesson in photography is that from negative we make a positive

I don't pretend to be an intellectual or a philosopher. I just look.