Everybody thought New York was this hard, cruel place, and I found it to be an extraordinarily wonderful place filled with the most interesting people.

Style is a way of talking about yourself.

My next film is always shaped by the last one... by the things I feel I didn't get right, or the things I like and want to try to develop further, but it always comes out of the last picture.

After the war, photography came alive, in part because everybody started to use the 35mm camera, and worked on the street instead of in a studio, and that made an enormous difference in not only how photographs looked, but what they were about.

It's interesting that there are places that words can't get to.

I was dyslexic as a child and it took me years to get passed that. I read a lot but it was hard and that didn't go away until my early-to-mid-twenties. So really what I was looking at were the photographs and the illustrations in magazines.

Although I had a few jobs that I didn't like, or quit, or got fired from, I really loved New York from the moment I got here and I never stopped.