When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

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

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.