To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.

Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.

I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do.

If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it's sort of a magpie aesthetic - I just go and pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It's not that I'm interested in children that much or photographing them - it's just that they were there.

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

It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles.

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