Ryan McGinley Quotes

Print-on-demand and electronic self-publishing options have made it easy for anyone to set up a business as a publisher whether they know what they're doing or not.

I gave away 'Life in Hell' when it was a little 'zine, and sold it at record stores for $1, and I knew from the time that I first did it that I would continue to do it, because it was fun.

Hugh Howey and Amanda Hocking come to mind immediately as authors who managed to build a successful following without the initial support of a large publisher.

The summer of 1991, I took $2,000 of my savings and a desktop program, and I asked my friends to write 800 words about something they cared about. I got eight or nine articles and put them together. It was no frills, black and white, no graphics. I printed them out and just dumped piles around D.C.

I'm always taking pictures and travelling with a camera and have so many photos that I've done a book.

It's a fascinating world to drop a finished product on the marketplace without the intercession of a publisher.

A cool thing about enthusiast press is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can decide they want to set out on this path and start publishing immediately.

Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.

I like to go through the zine sections of local bookstores when on the road and have found a lot of really great kind of underground stuff that way. It all feeds into everything else.

Maybe I'll just write books. I'd like to make another movie, but I don't want to go back and [do] what they want you to do, to make it for a million dollars. I did that. I don't need a lot, but I need what I used to get, and they don't give you that anymore.

Self-published media are really critical. It's so heartwarming that people are still doing it in this digital age. It's just really moving and exciting. You can't really replace a beautiful little mini-comic. It doesn't translate to the computer, you know? Handmade stuff has really given me hope for humanity.

I was giving a lecture and I said, that's enough about The Photographic Life, meaning my biography, now let's talk about the life of a photograph. And in that one instant I got the title for a potential next book.

Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.

If everybody can author their own story, if media is democratizing because everybody can make a really good-looking website... that's the way we learn now instead of in books. It means that more people get to tell their own story in their own terms rather than having to go through publishers and editors and executives.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

The book-keeping of benefits is simple: it is all expenditure; if any one returns it, that is clear gain; if he does not return it, it is not lost, I gave it for the sake of giving.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

I look at life like a big book and sometimes you get half way through it and go 'Even though I've been enjoying it, I've had enough. Give us another book.'

I think they thought it was very arrogant of me to write the end of my seven books series when I didn't have a publisher and no-one had heard of me

I do write, but for now I am keeping it all in the desk drawer. I have always written. The only book that I have published was "Revolution," during the election campaign, a book that contains both personal and political chapters. I have never been happy with what I have written, including three novels that, from my point of view, are incomplete.

Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.

The danger is to stupidly believe that depicting facts gives us much insight. If facts were the only thing that counted, the telephone directory would be the book of books.

The photographer in my head says: Give me peace. Flash. Give me release. Flash.

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.

... And we talk it out. Lately, I've had Roy Thomas come in, and he sits and makes notes while we discuss it. Then he types them up, which gives us a written synopsis. Originally - I have a little tape recorder - I had tried taping it, but then I found no one on staff has time to listen to the tape again later. But this way he makes notes, types it quickly, I get a carbon, the artist gets a carbon ... so we don't have to worry that we'll forget what we've said.