Quotes from Nan Goldin

One of my assistants, a British man, says I should find a platform for [cosmetic industry]. Meanwhile I wear make-up.

No place could be less sympathetic to my politics than America.

I knew from a very early age, that what I saw on tv had nothing to do with real life. So I wanted to make a record of real life. That included having a camera with me at all times.

My life is more important. At this point in my life I'm alone. I don't think about it a lot.

Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.

Each time I spend with Stella McCartney, I like her better. So I was excited to be asked by her.

In Paris now, when I walk into stores and the shopgirls literally say to me every time, "We don't have anything in your size".

The only time I went out was to go to bars at night and all the pictures were taken with a flash because there was no light at all. However now I'm very interested in light.

I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I've lost.

I had my first museum showing of my slide show in Rotterdam, in 1983. I love Rotterdam. I love harbour cities in general.

My desire is to preserve the sense of people's lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I want the people in my pictures to stare back.

I think it killed my sister as the times she was living in were so conformist. This is a subject I really want to deal with. I want to start making films about female rage.

I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I've lost.

It takes nerve to walk down the street when you fall between the cracks.

You are who you pretend to be.

For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody—it's a caress, I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.

Sex is only one aspect of sexual dependency. Pleasure becomes the motivation, but the real satisfaction is romantic. Bed becomes a forum in which struggles in a relationship are defused or intensified. Sex isn't about performance; it's about a certain kind of communication founded on trust and exposure and vulnerability that can't be expressed any other way.

The pictures in this book are not of people suffering gender dysphoria but rather expressing gender euphoria. This book is about new possibilities and transcendence. The people in these pictures are truly revolutionary; they are the real winners of the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring.

It's easy to make your life into stories. But it's harder to sustain real memories…The difference between a story and a real memory, the real experience has a smell and is dirty and is not wrapped up in simple endings. The real memories are what effects me now. Things can appear that you don't want to see, where you're not safe, and even if you don't actually unleash the memories, the effect is there. It's in your body.

When I was fifteen, the perfect world seemed a place of total androgyny, where you wouldn't know a person's gender until you were in bed with him or her. I've since realized that gender is so much deeper than style.

If I do continue to do fashion, I would want to radicalise it.

The main thing that I want to say is that I don't think women are at their most beautiful in their adolescence or in their early 20s.

Plastic surgery is distressingly popular and I feel that the fashion industry has killed tens of thousands of women over the years from anorexia.

I have very healthy strong relationships with women.