Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.

There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.

There are a lot of ways to talk about the life of a photograph. You can talk about the afterlife of a photograph, and in the end I talk about that, with the Richard Prince picture. But mainly, what I dedicated the book to being about was how photographs begin their life, and where they begin it. And they begin it with the photographer's imagination and instinct and experience.

My father taught me photography. It was his hobby, and we had a small darkroom in the fruit cellar of our basement. It was the kind of makeshift darkroom that was only dark at night.

The unusual wins out over the usual.

I'm very involved in photographing America now, so I don't think of faraway places, as I did when I was young.