Quotes from Sally Mann

I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.

The two sensibilities, the visual and the verbal, have always been linked for me - in fact, while reading a particularly evocative passage, I will imagine what the photograph I'd take of that scene would look like, even with burning and dodging notes. Maybe everyone does this.

I have a vivid, apocalyptic imagination.

I'm not a good photographer, not a good writer. I'm a pretty regular person whose insecurity is so pervasive that it makes me always feel vulnerable.

Though I made my share of mistakes, as all parents do, I was devoted to my kids. I walked them to school every morning and walked back to pick them up at 3.

The fundamental thing about my personality is that I think I'm an imposter.

I feel I'm a strange mixture of insecurity and strength. Most of us, probably most people. I'm transferring that same concept to the people I photograph.

The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.

The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody's hand.

Increasingly, the work I'm doing is in service to an idea rather than just to see what something looks like photographed. I'm trying to explore how I feel about something through photography.

I never read about photography.

I chose photography over writing. I had to make a living.

When you look at your life as an artist, you do see that when you get to be 60, you're coming - this is the last chapter.

It's always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary...it never occurred to me to leave home to make art.

Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future

Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant.

I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to the emotional core of me.

Weeks go by, and I don't talk to another living soul.

I have no animus toward digital, though I still pretty much take everything on a silver-based negative, either a wet plate or just regular silver 8x10. But I've started messing a little bit with scanning the negative and then reworking it just slightly.

When we were on the farm, we were isolated, not just by geography but by the primitive living conditions: no electricity, no running water and, of course, no computer, no phone.

Matte digital prints are gorgeous, don't you agree? But the glossy digital prints, I just can't stand that paper.

I guess I have a certain willingness for audacity.

Don't get between me and a really good picture in the darkroom, because then I want to go straight to the darkroom and develop it. But once that's done, I'm fine.

I had written my master's thesis on Ezra Pound on 'The Cantos.' And don't ask me about it. I don't remember anything about it.