I am at war with the obvious.

Many people one meets in life somehow think they know you simply because they're hanging out at the same counter-but they really don't know a thing about you.

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.

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

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.

Unfortunately they're practically all dead. And many were my closest associates: friends, co-directors, whatever you want to say - my partners in crime.

I think with being blind the one thing you would have going is that you could still feel things, see your way around so to speak. And if you had had the experience of seeing at one time in your life, then you would know what it was like and be able to function. I've said this before, I think I could really photograph blind if I had to.