Doisneau Quotes

#1. I first went there late one afternoon with the fabled Paris photographer Robert Doisneau, who thrived on collecting local color.

Stanley Karnow

#2. A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Robert Doisneau

#3. I think of rounds of editing as hammer time. Then, when they interrupt my writing, I can say ... *shakes head* Nah, I just can't do it. Although when I come across a brilliant line, I do think, Can't touch this. And when I'm worried I'm overwriting a scene, I think, Hammer, don't hurt 'em.

Brent Weeks

#4. To suggest is to create; to describe is to destroy.

Robert Doisneau

#5. The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.

Robert Doisneau

#6. Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.

Robert Doisneau

#7. I prefer my hesitations, my false paths, my stammering, to a preconceived idea.

Robert Doisneau

#8. Santa is a much bigger and more powerful faery than Toot, and I don't know his true name anyway. You'd never see me trying to nab Saint Nick in a magic circle even if I did. I don't think anyone has stones that big.

Jim Butcher

#9. People hate us, blah blah blah, wish we'd go straight to hell, or maybe Wisconsin, since it's closer, blah blah blah.

Chloe Neill

#10. Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly.

Robert Doisneau

#11. When people talk to me about picture hunters, I very quietly laugh. I'm not a hunter of pictures, I'm a fisher of pictures.

Robert Doisneau

#12. A photographer who made a picture from a splendid moment, an accidental pose of someone or a beautiful scenery, is the finder of a treasure.

Robert Doisneau

#13. To freeze time, to hold on to youth, this business makes no sense.
It's always time that wins in the end.

Robert Doisneau

#14. Hatred and bitterness and anger only consume the vessel that contains them. It doesn't hurt another soul.

Rubin Carter

#15. I don't photograph life as it is, but life as I would like it to be,

Robert Doisneau

#16. The photographer must be absorbent - like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment ... His technique should be like an animal function ... he should act automatically.

Robert Doisneau

#17. Its so painful to think, and tell me what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever get me?

Jonathan Safran Foer

#18. Fuck it, I thought. As Don Rumsfeld once said, You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.

Avi Steinberg

#19. Chance is the one thing you can't buy. You have to pay for it and you have to pay for it with your life, spending a lot of time, you pay for it with time, not the wasting of time but the spending of time.

Robert Doisneau

#20. If I have to move up in a building, I choose the elevator over the escalator. Because one time I was riding the escalator and I tripped. I fell down the stairs for an hour and a half.

Demetri Martin

#21. All the fear in the world is not going to change anything, only rob me of what little I have.

Anne Perry

#22. If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

Robert Doisneau

#23. For a photographer, the first 70 years are a bit difficult, but after that things get better.

Robert Doisneau

#24. Catfish has a nice firm texture and mild flavor.

Tom Douglas

#25. I saw Hulk Hogan the other day in a parking lot, and I couldn't tell from a distance if it was Hulk Hogan or not. And I realized I've never had that dilemma before. I've always been able to tell immediately when looking at anybody if they were or were not Hulk Hogan.

Kyle Cease

#26. You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.

Robert Doisneau

#27. I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

Francine Rivers

#28. There are days when simply seeing feels like happiness itself ... You feel so rich, the elation seems almost excessive and you want to share it

Robert Doisneau

#29. Photography is very subjective. Photography is not a document on which a report can be made. It is a subjective document. Photography is a false witness, a lie.

Robert Doisneau

#30. They want to hold on to you and your people. They have isolated the ones who might grow powerful and overthrow their debauched reign.

Walter Mosley

#31. I don't usually give out advice or recipes, but you must let the person looking at the photograph go some of the way to finishing it. You should offer them a seed that will grow and open up their minds.

Robert Doisneau

#32. If you take photos, don't speak, don't write, don't analyze yourself, and don't answer any questions.

Robert Doisneau

#33. I hate collectors, the ones who take something just for themselves.

Robert Doisneau

#34. He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

Kurt Vonnegut

#35. Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words, killing me softly with his song.

Roberta Flack

#36. What philosopher of the schoolroom, with the mental dowry of four summers, ever questions the power of the wand that opened the dark eyes of the beautiful princess, or subtracts a single inch from the stride of seven leagues?

Robert Aris Willmott