"I'm often asked by students how a photographer gets over the fear and uneasiness in many people about facing a camera, and I just say that any sensitive man is bothered by a thing like that unless the motive is so strong and the belief in what he’s doing is so strong that it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to do the picture. And I advise people who are bothered by this to cure it by saying to themselves, what I’m doing is harmless to these people really, and there’s no malevolence in it and there’s no deception in it, and it is done in a great tradition, examples of which are Daumier and Goya. Daumier’s Third Class Carriage is a kind of snapshot of some actual people sitting in a railway carriage in France in eighteen-something."

"So long as the figures 'now superseded' and the academic projections based upon them held sway, it was possible for politicians to shrug their shoulders. With so much of immediate and indisputable imp…"

"I had no car, no money, and it was tough seeing others have what I didn't have even though I was working. I mean the social pressures to have the flyest ride, clothes, and financial mobility started t…"

"I consider you the most honest and truthful of men, more honest and truthful than anyone; and if they say that your mind . . . that is, that you're sometimes afflicted in your mind, it's unjust. I mad…"

"I always said I’d never go to New York until someone pays me—because I’ve seen people come back from New York like desiccated, broken… New York is a tough place if you’re coming out of Port Authority …"