To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

You can't see fear or lust; you can't photograph someone's anxieties, how disappointment feels. Photographs are approximations.

Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.