I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.

The immediate reviews were very hostile, but they didn't bother me-I had the attitude that I was right. The poor guys who were critics just didn't understand the works at all. I was sorry about that, but it didn't weigh on my mind a bit.

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

Only the few times I've been to so-called treatment centers, which were a complete waste of money and useless. I didn't know what I was doing at the time, because I was always drunk when I checked in.

A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white-people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing. What each of us was doing photographically was entirely different, but we were basically coming from the same place, sort of like a club.

You become technically proficient whether you want to or not, the more you take pictures.

A person can attack that bottle of vodka and drink it like it's a bottle of cold water. Two of my wife's girlfriends died from drinking. They weren't big pill-takers; they were drinkers. So it can't be so simple as to slide away, like Marilyn Monroe.