“I came to New York to see what I could see — that's from a children's book, isn't it? — and to find the living part.”

“I didn’t photograph people as an example of New York urban something or other. I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.”

“I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour.”

“Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don't want to go home in the dark.”

“Well, and the 'X-rays' [X-Ray, 1991, black and white photograph]... I was just interested in seeing what it looks like inside my head – and the idea that they could just examine the inside of my head like a globe. And then I photographed the facades in New York. [at the end of the 19-nineties]... I did the books at the end of the nineties, and I did the facades shortly after that.”

“I can't see heaven but I credit hell —
I live in New York so I know it well.
When they shut out heaven with the Fuller Dome
God gave it up and He went home.”

“Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.”

“It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself.”