There really is no moment. The picture is the moment. 

 Usually I think if there is something imperfect in a photograph it makes the picture more real. Photographs that are slick, smooth, and perfect seem less honest to me. 

 A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don’t think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won’t take an interest in it. 

 Working alone on stories, I began to feel the anonymity of motels on interstate highways reached by jet planes and rental cars. It was hard to have a good time, and the only way I could make the loneliness excusable was by taking pictures I thought were very good, even valuable. 

 There are two kinds of photographs: mine and other people’s. I never think of what I might do myself when I look at someone else’s pictures... there is no subject in the world I have ever wanted to photograph. It’s the picture, not the object, that is important to me. 

 Like doctors, photographers work with what is present. I suspect our chief emotions are anticipation, frustration, and patience, balanced by a marvelous sense of elation when things go right—when we think we’ve captured within a photograph some missing feeling, some sense of beauty, or bit of mystery in the fabric of life. 

 I wanted to make... flat pictures that had depth; to find a picture by chance, yet have some control over it. 

 When I teach a class I often give the assignment: “Photograph someone you love.” I ask people to do this so they have a subject about whom they have feelings, a subject that is more than a model, or an object, or a shape, or an idea. In this way, they can judge the result not only by its technical success, but also by how well it describes their feelings.