William Eggleston Quotes

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.

I am at war with the obvious.

I don't think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day.

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

I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.

Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it's just about impossible to follow up with words. They don't have anything to do with each other.

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

There is no particular reason to search for meaning.

It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.

Photography just gets us out of the house.

You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.

I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify.

I don't look at other photographs much at all. I don't know why. I study my own a lot.

I don't like reading music. It's like learning a language. You can't read music proficiently overnight. It takes time, it's boring work.

I would go there quite frequently. I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.

Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

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

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

It was something new that was happening everywhere. You couldn't miss it. If you needed to go to the grocery you would go to the predecessors of the big supermarkets of today.

I have some that I have become a well-known-even infamous-client of, mostly in Memphis. But a great deal of that is legend and doesn't have anything to do with truth.

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

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.

I quite frequently don't look through the camera, which is very close to being blind.

I like to photograph democratically.

I knew it was happening, but I never paid much attention to it . . . just to the passage of time. Something new always slowly changes right in front of your eyes - it just happens.

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

I would play music every day from the time I was about 4 or 5 years old. Every time I would go from one end of the house to the other, I would pass the piano and play a few notes.