I just picked up a camera without any kind of ambition to be good or bad. And especially without any ambition to make a living... My whole freedom working in photography comes because I say to myself, Let's see what is going on in this world. Let's find out. How do these people look?

It is the surface I am interested in. Because the surface is the inside.

I have often been asked what I wanted to prove by my photographs. The answer is, I don’t want to prove anything. They prove to me, and I am the one who gets the lesson.

Don't shoot til the subject hits you in the pit of your stomach.

The snapshooter’s pictures have an apparent disorder and imperfection, which is exactly their appeal and their style. The picture isn’t straight. It isn’t done well. It isn’t composed. It isn’t thought out. And out of this imbalance, and out of this not knowing, and out of this real innocence toward the medium comes an enormous vitality and expression of life.

Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.

Never take a picture of anything you are not passionately interested in.