Quotes from Nan Goldin

I have no ambivalence about myself wearing make-up or designer clothes but I have an enormous ambivalence about what the fashion world has done to women.

I'm very much interested in water and women in water. I've been photographing that for years although I didn't really know it at the time.

I love all the Hollywood women. I saw all the films when I was a teenager. Jack Smith's "Flaming Creatures".

My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them.

My work shows the beauty in so many different kinds of people because I never photograph anyone who I don't think is beautiful. I never take an intentionally mean picture.

One of the major things I really want to work on now is female rage because that's not dealt with at all - and I have a lot of it.

I don't think I am going to do pictures which are anything like Renaissance art.

The things that I look at include Renaissance art. I'm obsessed with churches and paintings of saints.

Now what I like is that other artists know my work and are interested in me or want to collaborate.

That's where I got the idea to paint the walls of the gallery with varied colours [at the Whitechapel show]. I tried to figure out how all these Renaissance paintings manage to work together.

My work is received more intelligently in Europe.

Usually people just do their own work. But I want to deal with the place and what it means to show in a mental hospital.

I don't know if Yves St Laurent likes my work but Pierre Bergé does.

I never courted that but it's nice when it's people you respect and they respect your work. It's thrilling.

I'm very flattered when people I respect like my work. It's like a dream of a little kid when somebody I idolised likes my work.

I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.

As a non-Catholic, and since I was a child, I have been obsessed with the ritual and the beauty of Catholic art. I look at Renaissance art all the time.

I also photographed Maggie Cheung - but these didn't develop into a friendship either.