Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular . . . sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.

Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gizmos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn't make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.

The vital elements are often momentary, change-sent things, ... a gleam of light on water, a trail of smoke from a passing train, a cat crossing the threshold. Sometimes they are a matter of luck, sometimes of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that you have seen.
It is usually some incidental detail that heightens the effect of a picture, stressing a pattern, deepening the sense of atmosphere.

This benefit of seeing...can come only if you pause a while,
extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image...
the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.

There are two kinds of photographs: mine and other people's. I never think of what I might do myself when I look at someone else's pictures...there is no subject in the world I have ever wanted to photograph.
It's the picture, not the object, that is important to me.

Trust that little voice in your head that says "Wouldn't it be interesting if....", and then do it.

You learn to see by practice. It's just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can't be photographed.
You just have to keep doing it.