Barbara Cooney Quotes

I became obsessed with the storytelling of photography and going on little adventures.

There's a lot of different things that make me want to take photos. A lot of it is, for a long time I've been obsessed with the thought of time travel with my camera.

Another year is fast approaching. Go be that starving artist you’re afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what’s on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world.

Traveling is all very well and good as long as you knew there is a place or person you can call home

I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

My manager said the next best inspiration to heartbreak is travel, and it's true.

My inspiration is life. My family, my friends, travelling, books, music, love, food, fashion. What inspires you?

In both business and personal life, I've always found that travel inspires me more than anything else I do.

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times...I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

As a result of my life on the road and the increasing number of rainy afternoons in cinemas, I began to get the idea that I might write a film.

I left Jamaica for a while, because as an artist I need to experience different things, see the world, have different energies. Living in one place is not good for me.

I want to liberate my imagination and my mind with every kind of movie. That is what I wanted to do all my life.

Photography gives you the opportunity to use your sensibility and everything you are to say something about and be part of the world around you. In this way, you might discover who you are, and with a little luck, you might discover something much larger than yourself.

You can't write about stuff you don't know about. You have to live it. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Live life to be a good songwriter.

The most interesting thing was looking out the window and taking photographs of different places on Earth.

When I photograph, what I'm really doing is seeking answers to things.

I wanted to go to acting school, and I did a few modeling jobs to pay for acting school. I never aspired to be a model. I met lots of photographers, and I learned a lot about light - as a source of love and illumination, light as a gift of love. On film, that's a massive contribution.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life.

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

When the magic hour arrives, my thoughts center on light rather than on the landscape. I search for perfect light, then hunt for something earthbound to match with it.

It's this mood, these sentiments - the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales - that I hope to inspire with this book.

People go, 'What do you want to do?' What do you want to do? What are you feeling? Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do—that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

The camera’s not a camera, really. It’s an open door we need to walk through. It’s up to us to keep moving our feet.

You only do exercises in art school. That's not the real thing. A little bit tells you so much. You have to find your own self. And you don't know what you are! But that's what you have to search for.

I enjoy traveling and recording far-away places and people with my camera. But I also find it wonderfully rewarding to see what I can discover outside my own window. You only need to study the scene with the eyes of a photographer.