I confess I prefer to engage with pictures which I've chosen myself out of the welter of unidentified pictures, without the intrusion of too much personal context - Ilike to be a detective, and dislike being an impresario.

New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead.

New York, which is founded on forward motion and thus loath to acknowledge its dead, merely causes them to walk, endlessly unsatisfied and unburied, to invade the precincts of supposed progress, to lay chill hands on the heedless present, which does not know how to identify the forces that tug at its rationality.

I always give money to a sidewalk con if the story is a good one, even if I don't believe a word of it. Art deserves to get paid.

I thought of New York as a free city, like one of those prewar nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions. I had never gotten around to changing my nationality from the one assigned me at birth, but I would have declared myself a citizen of New York City had such a stateless state existed, its flag a solid black.

I try to take pictures on their own terms, considering the historical and social context from which they emerge.

The US remains an object of fascination for me, and the subject of much study, but while many of my friends etc. are American and I have no plans at present to move elsewhere, I consider myself a permanent outsider.