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.

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.

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.

The only thing I know anything about are my own fantasies and anxieties. I don't trust my eyes. I consider myself to be a short-story writer.