The images which the [press] photographer has filtered from reality, whether particular events or the anguish of human reactions to them, already bear a stamp of authenticity which the photographer is powerless to alter by one jot or tittle; the meaning of the objects, by a process of purification, itself becomes the theme of the work.

For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.

Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.

As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.

Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness - amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko's treachery.

The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority

The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.