That's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.

There are photographs that I don’t take now, that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.

Different members of different cultures will think that some things are beautiful.

Any artist that's involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do.

I don't photograph any two people who are remotely the same.

When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed consent question was answerable.

That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.

All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in.

The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.

I'm the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no errand for me.

I found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the raid on my apartment happened.

When people starts to enjoy a writer's pen, he becomes a legend even if his stories are neither long nor publicly surrounded by expectations.

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

hypocrisy

The shows are the main way our lives have changed.

Every week when my batch of weekly cartoons would go to FedEx, it felt like a small miracle. Then in a few days, it's 'Here we go again.'

No one goes into standup to make money. The frustration and rejection are just too much.

I believe that summer is our time, a time for the people, and that no politician should be allowed to speak to us during the summer. They can start talking again after Labor Day.

The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, it is the thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous. . . .

Passion impels our deeds; ideology supplies the explanations.

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.