For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.