Photography means releasing oneself from one type of gravity and placing oneself in a space where a different force is trying to move you. 

 Sometimes when I face an object I feel revulsion. If that happens, I don’t release the shutter. Whatever one believes, the act of taking a picture implies the affirmation of the subject, whether consciously or not. 

 Let’s say that I sleep an average of six hours a day—that leaves eighteen hours: 64,800 seconds. If I take a photograph in 1/1000th of a second, then the slice of time represented by that picture is 1/64, 800,000th of one day... 

 When I am faced with the victims of the bomb, I find myself almost praying as I release the shutter of my camera. It is as if they are the God of the fin-de-siècle, Christ of the nuclear age. 

 I dream of a new kind of camera connected directly to the cerebral cortex. It should be no bigger than a pair of eyeglasses and no heavier than a hat. It would work continuously, automatically adjusting its shutter speed, aperture, and focus, zooming in a moment from extreme close-up to extreme long shot. The photographer would only have to think that he wants to take a photograph of a thing. The film would wind automatically, and you would be able to take a thousand photographs without changing it. It would be both black-and-white and color. Recording one’s position might be impossible, but the date and time of each photograph would show on the edges of the film—automatically, as on a calendar watch. With this new camera attached to my body, I would just shoot and shoot and shoot... (1968) 

 I have embarked on a nameless sea of chaos that is neither America nor Japan. It is a global sea, and we all float there.