The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.

A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.