Quotes from William Eggleston

You want to make the photograph work in every way possible. Doesn't matter where it is in the world.

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

I'm not particular. I don't have favourite pictures.

I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.

A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white - people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing.

Everything must work in concert. Composition is important, but so are many other things, from content to the way colours work with or against each other.

Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.

I don't think much about the digital world... because I am in the analog world!

Many people one meets in life somehow think they know you simply because they're hanging out at the same counter-but they really don't know a thing about you.

I knew it was happening, but I never paid much attention to it . . . just to the passage of time. Something new always slowly changes right in front of your eyes - it just happens.

I would play music every day from the time I was about 4 or 5 years old. Every time I would go from one end of the house to the other, I would pass the piano and play a few notes.

I have some that I have become a well-known-even infamous-client of, mostly in Memphis. But a great deal of that is legend and doesn't have anything to do with truth.

Unfortunately they're practically all dead. And many were my closest associates: friends, co-directors, whatever you want to say - my partners in crime.

I am at war with the obvious.

Something new always slowly changes right in front of your eyes - it just happens.

We have a few things in common - smoking, drinking, and women. Photography just gets us out of the house. (To photographer Juergen Teller)

I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more important or less important.

I don't like reading music. It's like learning a language. You can't read music proficiently overnight. It takes time, it's boring work.

I would go there quite frequently. I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.

I like to think that my works flow like music. That may be one reason I work in large groups versus one picture of one thing; it's the flow of the whole series that counts.

I work very quickly. I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two.

Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it's ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.