Quotes from Don McCullin

The real truth of life is on the streets. Photograph the daily lives of people, and how they exist, and how they fight for space and time and pleasure.

I met an Englishwoman in Africa. She said she became a doctor because she saw one of my pictures. That's all I want – just one doctor in Africa.

I have a dark room, and I still process film, but digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience; you can move anything you want... the whole thing can't be trusted, really.

I'm from England, and like every other great empire who stole bits of the world, there is a price to pay. And I was born in 1935. So, since I've been conscious of the world, I've either been in, or been on the periphery of, a war zone.

I was dyslexic and uneducated and left school at 14. I grew up in Finsbury Park, which was a pretty bad place where you had to fight and be beaten. It was just a constant roundabout of violence.

I started out on photography accidentally. A policeman came to a stop at the end of my street, and a guy knifed him at the end of my street. That's how I became a photographer. I photographed the gangs that I went to school with.

Every street in London has a camera, and if you ever travel up the M4, it feels as if George Orwell should be your chauffeur.

America has never taken me to its heart. I've always been an outsider.

I grew up as a boy with aggression.

You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery, and death. You have to wade through to record them.