Quotes from Brandon Stanton

Of all the places I've been, India is the one that's on the top of my list to return to.

I didn't actually begin photographing, or even visit New York, for the first time until I was 26.

If I had sat around and waited until I had an idea to be a successful photographer, I would still be in finance.

I'm not even really attempting to brand myself outside of 'Humans of New York.' I think part of the reason for my success is that I've put my ego aside and said I'm not going to put all of my effort into trying to promote myself. I'm going to try to promote my work and am going to try to promote my project.

I think it's important to try to get on a kid's level when taking their photo.

A lot of the children I photograph are extremely colorfully dressed in some way. But I also find a lot of kids with outsized personalities or who happen to be doing something charming.

The most pivotal moments in people's lives revolve around emotions. Emotions make stories powerful.

My interviews are very pointed. I'm an active participant; I will kindly interrupt people. But I've learned there is nothing people won't tell you if you ask in a compassionate and legitimately interested way.

New York has the biggest, most eclectic collection of people in the world.

My two biggest lessons learned as a trader are take risks and get comfortable with taking losses and setbacks to help move you forward.

Whenever you get a large body of work like 'Humans of New York,' a natural pathway becomes to put it between two covers. I wanted this to be a very nice keepsake. A lot of work went into it, and a lot of fans are attached to it.

Wherever I go, I just try to show normal life. If the work helps to dispel stereotypes, it's because I seek not to portray the extremities of a place, but the vast majority of people who are quite normal and are having normal life experiences.

I'm a believer in the ordinary person, that the ordinary person is just as important and has an equally unique perspective on the world as someone who is famous or perhaps more privileged.

As an artist in the 21st century, my two goals are to make the best work that I can, improve as much as I can, and to distribute that work as far as I can.

I've always felt like an artistic person. I can't draw or paint or sculpt. I never really had technical skills, but I've always felt like I appreciate really beautiful things, and part of taking a good photograph is being able to recognize beauty.

I've got 50,000 Facebook fans inside of Iran, and Facebook is banned in Iran. I think the people who follow 'Humans of New York' the most after New York City is Tehran. I have a really special affection for the Persian people because they've really taken to my work.

I know I have a caption that I'm going to use when somebody tells me something I've never heard before. It's very rarely a thought, a philosophy, when somebody says, 'Oh, I don't like cheese' or 'Oh, I think the government should be overthrown,' because so many people share these thoughts. But what people don't share is stories.

I always say that my favorite people to interview are the people who are at the beginning and the ends of their lives because they have two alternate perspectives of the world, and neither of them are less profound.

I've done commercial work for Amtrak. However, that was branded as Stanton. I stipulated at the very beginning that it was not going to involve 'Humans of New York,' that I wasn't going to promote it on 'Humans of New York.' So nobody who follows me really even knows that I did it.

I think that even though some of the things on 'Humans of New York' are kind of very personal and very revealing, I think the discomfort with sharing that tends to be overwritten by the appreciation of being able to distill the experience of your life into a story and share it with other people.

Somebody's willingness to let me photograph them, and willingness to tell me a story, has nothing to do with the words I say. It all has to do with the energy I'm giving off, which hopefully is very genuine, very interested energy. It's just two people having a conversation in the street. I think that's where genuine content comes from.

When I meet somebody in the street who knows about 'Humans of New York,' a lot of times they might have a scripted answer, and that scripted answer is the first thing to come out of their mouth.

It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives.

Each time I arrived in a new city, I'd get lost in the streets and photograph everything that looked interesting, taking nearly a thousand photographs every day. After each day of shooting, I'd select 30 or 40 of my favorite photographs and post them on Facebook. I named the albums after my first impression of each city.