I'm pretty selective. I generally edit the contact sheets and then do work prints. Because I have my own lab and printers, I can afford the luxury of going through the contact sheets for black-and-white, making up work prints, seeing them big, and honing them down.

Regardless of whether you speak the language or are familiar with a culture, the picture should hold up.

When you start out, you're not really aware. I didn't have a sense of photographic history.

I always enjoyed art history because, growing up in California, my exposure was limited, and it was a new experience. To learn the history of art opened up certain things to me, made me see. It intrigued me.

What I particularly liked was that, coming from California and not being involved in the New York scene, I developed my personal way, in my own way, at my own pace.

I'd go down to the end of my street, to a garage that had a certain feeling about it, or a particular light; I'd take a picture of a friend who needed a head shot. That's how I learned, instead of having school assignments and learning camera techniques.

Generally, the French highly promote culture and the arts, and photography is in their blood.

The education, the cultural awareness, is different in Europe, especially in France, from that in the United States. So I think the public will be much more appreciative of many images.

I like form and shape and strength in pictures.

Actually, when I first started dabbling in photography, I was still working for my parents as a salesman.

I think a lot of the time these days people are so concerned about having the right camera and the right film and the right lenses and all the special effects that go along with it, even the computer, that they're missing the key element.

I'm pretty selective. I generally edit the contact sheets and then do work prints. Because I have my own lab and printers, I can afford the luxury of going through the contact sheets for black-and-white, making up work prints, seeing them big, and honing them down.

For me, the most important thing I learned was just honing my eye. I think I had a good eye.

Within two hours of where I live, you have mountains and desert as location. I like the natural elements that abstract into light, texture, shape and shadow.

Once you develop your own style, you know when you're able to give your best. Feeling at home is part of it, and I don't think that's an L.A. thing. It's a matter of the environment and of what affects you.

Even though I didn't get a business degree, I enjoyed learning about economics.

I did grow up next door to Steve McQueen, who was a very famous movie star at the time, but as a kid it didn't impress me. We always had great fun with him. He would take us out on Sundays on his motorcycles, riding around in the desert; he was like a second father.

That's why I felt so at home when I went to Africa. It didn't matter that I was halfway around the world in a foreign country, because all those elements are universal. And I think that's one thing about my work: It's universal.

I think knowing people by first names, not by what they do sexually, is really what it's about. Not being afraid. Fear is the enemy. I've always been comfortable with being gay.

Well, I liked it - that was the main thing. I liked it, but I didn't think of it in terms of a career. I didn't really know; I didn't really think about it. One thing just led to another until finally I quit my job as a salesman and found myself working as a photographer.

Many people who excel are self-taught.

I was an economics major, which I enjoyed because I had a good business sense.

Yes, but don't forget I also have the luxury of the worlds finest band when it gets lonely.

I've been lucky enough to have had the luxury of being able to make the picture I've wanted to make each time on my own terms and without compromise.

We settled this continent without art. So it was easy for us to treat it as an imported luxury, not a necessity.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us.

There are a lot of things going on with my life right now that don't just have to do with career. So I have a hard time making decisions about work. That's really a luxury problem.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

I think most Americans believe that although it's better not to use military force if you can avoid it, that the world simply doesn't provide us the luxury of giving away military force as an important tool of foreign policy.

Poverty wants some, luxury many, and avarice all things.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

But that's one of the nice things about doing a stage show, if something doesn't work out, you have the luxury of working on it over time.

Pain adds rest unto pleasure, and teaches the luxury of health.

In marriage there are no manners to keep up, and beneath the wildest accusations no real criticism. Each is familiar with that ancient child in the other who may erupt again. We are not ridiculous to ourselves. We are ageless. That is the luxury of the wedding ring.

Television has certain imperatives that CNN had the luxury of ignoring for a long period of time. CNN could take the position that the news would be the star, because in most of the programming day, they were the only all-news operation on the air.

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

Luxury is an enticing pleasure, a bastard mirth, which hath honey in her mouth, gall in her heart, and a sting in her tail.

I have a kind of objective luxury about my career.

To me luxury is to be at home with my daughter, and the occasional massage doesn't hurt.

But I have had the luxury of working on good films with great people.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

Anger is an expensive luxury in which only men of certain income can indulge.

For the first time, I lived alone... in a luxury apartment on Sunset Strip. For a few days I loved the idea, but I got lonely and restless.

What one generation sees as a luxury, the next sees as a necessity.