The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

When we tune in to an especially human way of viewing the landscape powerfully, it resonates with an audience.

The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted.

A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.

I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light.

There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.

I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.

The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.

Today, I'm very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions.

I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

Wanting to take a light camera with me when I climb or do mountain runs has kept me using exclusively 35 mm.

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I'm not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I'm not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world.

My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers.

There's no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.

If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.

My first thought is always of light.

And most of my early pictures failed but about one in a 100 somehow looked better than what I saw.

Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.

I'm exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.

I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

These days, most nature photographers are deeply committed to the environmental message.

One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it.

Luckily, many other people tell me how they have had a particular landscape photograph of mine in their office or bedroom for 15 years and it always speaks to them strongly whenever they see it.

I think that cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.

Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England?

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

Being a musician is what I do, but it's not what I am.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

We've had it very clear to the Bosnians that our obligation to equip and train their forces is completely conditional on the foreign forces being gone.

My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

The judge turned his back towards me, sitting back on his judge's chair, while I was in the witness stand being questioned. The whole courtroom was full of these anarchists, leftists, communists and Jewish lobbyists.

For me, being in front of the camera and training go hand in hand.

I define success as being comfortable with yourself and your life. And that is about as good as it gets, really.