Rory MacLean Quotes

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.

Neighborhoods change. In some ways, it's part of the beauty of New York City. It's in a constant state of flux.

Like every New Yorker, I have a love/hate relationship with the city. There are times it's overbearing, but when I'm away even for a little while, I can't wait to get home. I am a New Yorker.

You don't have to be born in New York City to be a New Yorker. You have to live here for six months. And if at the end of the six months you walk faster, you talk faster, you think faster, you're a New Yorker.

The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.

Common sense means living in the world as it is today; but creative people are people who don't want the world as it is today but want to make another world.

All is flux, nothing is stationary.

This is a world of process, not a world of things.

Things always change, and New York teaches you that.

New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.

The city keeps reinventing itself. And each generation thinks, as they enter it, that they've missed the best of it, and then they become the authors of the next "best." And so it goes on and on and on. And New York keeps redefining itself and reinventing itself, and then you look at it and it's pretty much the way it was back in the 1920's., or in the 1930's. Something stylistically different in some ways, but it's still got the same vitality.

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.

Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.

Nothing lasts in New York. Everything's always changing in really obvious ways.

Flow in the living moment - We are always in a process of becoming and nothing is fixed.

All things change, nothing is extinguished. There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.

In English we say 'we are' but it's proper to say 'we are becoming' because things are becoming.

Through reading, I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. And, through books, I got to travel the world and the universe. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way - through the power of words - to change the world.

Photography is a transformation, not a reproduction.

Are you becoming what you've always hated?

The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it

New York is the only real city-city.

Autumn to winter, winter into spring, Spring into summer, summer into fall,-- So rolls the changing year, and so we change; Motion so swift, we know not that we move.

I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea.