William Eggleston Quotes

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

As a composer and as a musician I'm a true believer - and this is not to be overly diplomatic - I'm a believer that there's artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There's art in absolutely everything.

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

It's far better to shoot a good picture than a good-looking picture.

Everything I choose to photograph, I think is beautiful.

One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject.

We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.

The good photographer will produce a competent picture every time whatever his subject. But only when his subject makes and immediate and direct appeal to his own interests will he produce a work of distinction.

I'm an artist that's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

I know that if I were to take ugly photographs, no one would be interested in looking at them.

I try to make pictures I would want to see.

I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

The photographs that are art have to be separated from the rest - then preserved.

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.

I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.

Entertainment is in art like color in pictures.

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.

Photography is not a fine art at all.

I paint and work as a sculptor, and I see architecture as an art… If you follow this approach you can use techniques to the service of man and to the service of an artistic idea, and beauty.

If you're a photographer, you end up being the raw creative force that allows other people to see what kind of narrative you want to be giving or what kind of art that you want people to see.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.