Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
I felt I had seen so much horror that it was likely to destroy me…. Yet… I cannot do without the head-on collision with life I have when I am working. 
Robert Morris
[Artist and theorist, b. 1931, Kansas City, Missouri, lives in New York.]
There is probably no defense against the malevolent powers of the photograph to convert every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image. Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more.Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired.
Keep going to the limit of endurance.
With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.
(1932, describing “Object To Be Destroyed,” made using a metronome and the photographed eye of artist, lover and collaborator Lee Miller who left him.)
Henry Miller
[Writer, b. 1890, New York, d. 1980, Pacific Palisades, California.]
[The photographer] is like a secretive insect who awaits for the appearance of some unknown epidemic before commencing his ravages. He is stubborn and elusive. He does the banal thing in order to hide his monstrous eccentricities. He has the eye of a ghoul, the indifference of a leper, the calm of a Buddha. He is insatiable. He is a monster—the most amiable, the most courteous, the most raffiné—but a monster.
(On Brassaï, who he lastingly dubbed “the eye of Paris.”) Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
I don’t even like photography at all. I’m just doing photography until I can do something better. Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
When one has a picture taken, the photographer says “Perfect!” Just as you are! That is death. William Burroughs
[Writer, b. 1914, St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1997, Lawrence, Kansas.]
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
A job the artist does which no-one else does is to dismantle existing communication codes and to combine some of their elements into structures which can be used to generate new pictures of the world.