We have a few things in common - smoking, drinking, and women. Photography just gets us out of the house. (To photographer Juergen Teller)

I like to photograph democratically.

I've also never had favorite pictures. Or subjects. I have this discipline of treating everything equally-I used to say "democratically."

I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

A picture is what it is and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.

My friend who I went to boarding school with was interested in photography. He insisted that I buy a camera and marched me downtown.