Sally Mann Quotes

Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

I don't expect to find inspiration. It just sort of comes. Sometimes you step on a bug and you get inspired.

My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

Chance has something to say, even how to write a good letter.

Half of art is accident, but there is no accident without free experiment.

I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.

I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

Somebody at one of these places asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You "don't try". That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like it's looks, you make a pet out of it.

Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity, and when you're photographing children there's often an abundance of it. I would have an idea of what a photograph would look like and then something would happen - a dog might lumber in and become a critical element. I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

I am always looking for ideas, whether it is in art on the street or in my world travels. It comes to me randomly and unexpectedly.

Some people are very lucky, and have the story in their heads. I've never storyboarded anything. I like the idea of chance. What makes God laugh is people who make plans.

As artists, we are so not in control most of the time of the content or the narrative of our characters, and sometimes writing takes a turn and it's not something we necessarily have control over. It's just a lot of random dumb luck, so when things click, you've just got to enjoy it.

Photography is an accident.

I consider projects very deeply, but there's always a point in your life where there's a bit of randomity.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

Modeling isn't boring.

I just consider being one of the luckiest people in the sense that creativity came to me and it flowed.

My idea of a good time is creating something and reading a good book.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.