Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

Sometimes I'm amazed by how much you can do as a photographer.

Photography is 1% talent and 99% moving furniture.

I enjoy photographing. It's always interesting, so I can't say one thing is more fun than another. Everything has it's own difficulties.

Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good.

The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

Every single thing you see on-screen came out of somebody's creativity. It doesn't exist. Nature didn't deliver it to us. Everything had to be dreamed.

I didn't have the time to literally write and draw the strip at the same time.

If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.

I go into my workroom seven mornings a week. There will only be one or two mornings a week where it seems to be going well, but to earn those days you have to go through slow, slodgy days where your mind feels like porridge.

As I have practiced it, photography produces pleasure by simplicity. I see something special and show it to the camera. A picture is produced. The moment is held until someone sees it. Then it is theirs.

I've learned to create a palette, a vocabulary of ways to take pictures.

I am always trying to write.

People don't realize that one picture for you is just one picture. But for me, I take a thousand pictures a day. That adds up. It's tough getting somewhere on time when you have to stop that much.

The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.

Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation.

Photography is my passion. Whenever I get time, I click.

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.

I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts.

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

Photography is better than art. It is a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun.

You don't take a picture, you make a picture.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

People may think that because I have illustrated and written all these books it must be easy for me, but it's not really easy for me. The drawing part is easy - I love doing it. But continuing to move forward is hard.