Harry Callahan Quotes

Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.

I don't have lights, I don't have assistants, I just go and meet somebody and take a photograph. That's really basic, and that's how I used to work when I was 17 or 18 in Holland.

I'm not very complicated.

My mother was a stout woman with a man's name - Billie. She was plain-faced with honest eyes - no black grease by the lash line, no blue powder on the lids, eyebrows not plucked up high and thin.

I'm not a complicated person.

I like real people. I like real things.

Mrs. Boffin and me, ma'am, are plain people, and we don't want to pretend to anything, nor yet to go round and round at anything because there's always a straight way to everything.

Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.

I find I don't need to be polished. I feel that you have to keep it real, and that's the best way to go.

Be modest, be humble, be simple.

I knew lots of Irish ladies in my life who would say daft things and then would just say something incredibly truthful in a very simple way with simple language - a few well chosen words that would take an intellectual five minutes to express. I like that.

Blessed are the simple, for they shall have much peace.

I do think that I am fundamentally the same relatively simple person I've always been. I just have this flashy, wacky job [actress] that confuses people into thinking that I'm somehow ultrafascinating.

Small towns seem to appreciate things a little bit more. They're less jaded and they're more kind of authentic and more themselves and they don't care as much.

And I'd like to leave quite a few friends behind and I hope I will. Other than that, I don't want nobody putting me on a pedestal when I leave here. I'm just one of the people ... just me.

How majestic is naturalness. I have never met a man whom I really considered a great man who was not always natural and simple. Affectation is inevitably the mark of one not sure of himself.

Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Take the shortest route. The one that nature planned - to speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that, and be free of pain and stress, free of all calculations and pretension.

I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.

People I admire have two qualities: a kind of simplicity, and generosity of spirit. It seems to me that the more impressive people are in what they have done, the simpler they tend to be in how they talk to you, or in what they say or write.

Simple is the language of truth.

I photograph what interests me. I'm not saying anything different.

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray... I am myself the matter of my book.