Sufjan Stevens Quotes

It's weird being a photographer because you really have to divorce yourself from the image.

I live my everyday life as a person, and I react to my photos from a certain distance. When I look at a photo, I detach myself and look at it as a product - not as me, Isabella.

Writers are first and foremost observers. We lose ourselves in the watching and then the telling of the world we find. Often we feel on the fringes, in the margins of life. And that's where we belong. What you are a part of, you cannot observe.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

I did about 2000 covers altogether, for all sorts of books - from Shakespeare to James Bond - and I always had the idea that I must give 100%, no matter who the author was.

I'm a designer, I love it, and I haven't worked this hard to do bad work.

I'm sometimes embarrassed by how clinical I can become when I'm out reporting.

Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.

I am best viewed from a distance.

Every writer is an outsider.

There was never a day at West Point where I didn't ask myself, 'Where would I put the camera?'

Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.

When you look at a wall spotted with stains...you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautiful with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees. Or again, you may see battles and figures in action, or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn figures.

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

The artist has only to trust his eyes.

If there is any method in the way I take pictures, I believe it lies in this: See the subject first. Do not try to force it to be a picture of this, that or the other thing. Stand apart from it. Then something will happen. The subject will reveal itself.

To be able to observe with a stranger's eye helps one to see with an artist's eye. What alienates us inspires.

It's hard to look at things that are too close.

To see some truths you must stand outside and look in.