All the good pictures that came so easily now make the next set of pictures virtually impossible in your mind.

Every image is in some way a “portrait,” not in the way that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force.

There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, 'If you don't break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough. I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself.

When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths 'told slant,' just as Emily Dickinson commanded.

My main interest was finding boyfriends. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in.

If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me.

It's always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary...it never occurred to me to leave home to make art.