My best work is often almost unconscious and occurs ahead of my ability to understand it.

It matters little how much equipment we use; it matters much that we be masters of all we do use.

Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.

Essentially what photography is is life lit up.

We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.

Life rarely presents fully finished photographs. An image evolves, often from a single strand of visual interest - a distant horizon, a moment of light, a held expression.

A mad, keen photographer needs to get out into the world and work and make mistakes.

Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.

For sheer majestic geography and sublime scale, nothing beats Alaska and the Yukon. For culture, Japan. And for all-around affection, Australia.

I wanted life to be episodic. I wanted to be a magazine photographer and I was willing to do what it took to become that.

Editorial photography has to be energetic and visually competitive.

No matter how many times you think you have failed, there is always another opportunity for you to succeed.

For the first time in ages I felt a tiny pinprick in my heart--not like it was breaking, but like something small and unseen had begun sewing it closed again.

I look at the cake in my mother's arms and think: here stands the only person in the whole world who'd go to such trouble for fractious, ungrateful me.

On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Shock waves to a tired brain, sends that hungry lady to my door again. She's my shelter from the storm when I feel the rain, entertaining white powder.

If I'd listened to customers, I'd have given them a faster horse.

There's a few people who I've accumulated over the years who I really trust to show a first cut to and to be helpful rather than unhelpful.

That's the point, to get the people who wouldn't otherwise think to eavesdrop on a conversation that involves science.

Poets know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.

Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?