Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.

Photographers deal in things which are continuously vanishing.

A photographer is part pick-pocket and part tightrope dancer.

And no photographs taken with the aid of flashlight either, if only out of respect of the actual light—even when there isn't any of it.

With the one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that is open, one looks without.

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

Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life.

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.

As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head.

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

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

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

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

It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.