I am an economic person; I judge the amount of work involved with the amount of worth attained.

Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.

If I'd had the nerve, I'd have become a thief or a gangster, but since I didn't, I became a photographer.

There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love.

I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society.

All critics should be assassinated.