James Baldwin Quotes

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

There are three sides to every story: my side, your side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently.

But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

A thing is never seen as it really is.

Objectivity does not exist - it cannot exist!.. The word is a hypocrisy which is sustained by the lie that the truth stays in the middle. No, sir: Sometimes truth stays on one side only.

Two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It's not logical; it's psychological.

The blind see what they want to see.

Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.

The truth isn't all things to all people all of the time.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

No one individual can tell the truth.

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

Great claims are being made for the photograph as truth. We are showing you things, we show you the war. I say you can't actually. The camera can't.

The camera is as subjective as we are.

The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.

What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information.

I don't want to be a pessimist. I'm a realist. One man's realist is another man's pessimist.

There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.

People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

Truth lies not only in a dream, but in many dreams.