Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me -- the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.

I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment. It is the only photo that influenced me. There is such intensity in this image, such spontaneity, such joie de vivre, such miraculousness, that even today it still bowls me over.

All I care about these days is painting -- photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

Success depends on one's general culture, on one's set of values, one's clarity of mind and vivacity. The thing to be most feared is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life.

The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.

Pictures should never be posed. They are 'revealed' so must be accepted as they are. Left alone.

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

This recognition, in real life, of a rhythm of surfaces, lines, and values is for me the essence of photography; composition should be a constant of preoccupation, being a simultaneous coalition -- an organic coordination of visual elements.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes.

Time runs and flows and only our death succeeds in catching up with it. Photography is a blade which, in eternity, impales the dazzling moment.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

The Photography is a chopper which in the eternity seizes the moment which dazzled it.

-- How do you make your pictures?
-- I don't know, it's not important.

Photography is like fencing. You must keep your distance, wait, and then thrust.