I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.

You see, I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America.

My mind is vacant on names, but I know him as well as anything. When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back.

I was poor. When you're poor you work, and when you're rich you expect somebody to hand it to you. So I think being reasonably poor is very good for people.

When I need names they drop out of my head; when I don't need them they drop back.

I don't think there's any such thing as teaching people photography, other than influencing them a little. People have to be their own learners. They have to have a certain talent.

When people ask me silly questions about my private life, I just say, I don't discuss that.

I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

There are certain things you don't discuss with Ansel, especially if you don't agree.

I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.

I hate big models.

I was invited to photograph Hollywood. They asked me what I would like to photograph. I said, Ugly men.

Everybody who does anything for the public can be criticized. There's always someone who doesn't like it.

Well, I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.

I became kind of a drop-out in science after I came back to America. I wanted to photograph.

I don't love the world. I think Jupiter should have hit us.

A woman said to me when she first sat down, You're photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?

I don't resent anything.

I don't talk about success. I don't know what it is. Wait until I'm dead.

I never stopped photographing. There were a couple of years when I didn't have a darkroom, but that didn't stop me from photographing.

I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life.

When People magazine called me, I did the job on Ansel. I'm older than Ansel and he has to mind me.

I'd never kill myself for a man. I wouldn't do it for anybody.

Get it out of your historic head.

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.

I told the students that whatever they did in class was for the wastebasket.

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

I don't know what love means.

Anybody is influenced by where and how he lives.

Some people say to me, Isn't it too bad that people discovered you so late? I never thought that.

The thing thats fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

The formula for doing a good job in photography is to think like a poet.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

Some gods may cross your path, but why should gods be beautiful? They could also be frightening.

And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.

So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.

There may or may not be a God or gods; the Siblings do not concern themselves with proving or disproving such a thing. By definition, gods are more powerful than men, and thus quite able to fend for themselves without help.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.

I saw my parents as gods whose every wish must be obeyed or I would suffer the penalty of anguish and guilt.

Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

The gods too are fond of a joke.