Saul Leiter Quotes

#1. The content of Saul Leiter's photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don't so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water.

Teju Cole

#2. Sometimes I'm amazed by how much you can do as a photographer.

Saul Leiter

#3. It is not only that we want to bring about an easy labor, without risking injury to the mother or the child; we must go further. We must understand that childbirth is fundamentally a spiritual, as well as a physical, achievement ... The birth of a child is the ultimate perfection of human love.

Grantly Dick-Read

#4. I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.

Saul Leiter

#5. I have been told that some of my photographs maybe indicate that I am a painter.

Saul Leiter

#6. In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music, and to paint when I feel like it.

Saul Leiter

#7. My father thought photography was done by lowlifes.

Saul Leiter

#8. I don't believe that classical architecture is enough to engage people anymore. They say: 'So what else is new?'

Peter Eisenman

#9. I may be old-fashioned. But I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty - a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don't think one should have to apologise for it.

Saul Leiter

#10. You have to trust someone before you can have rituals with them.

Rachel Klein

#11. My family was very unhappy about my becoming a photographer - profoundly and deeply unhappy.

Saul Leiter

#12. I like it when one is not certain what one sees. When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion.

Saul Leiter

#13. In most Arab countries, it is still taboo for a woman to live alone and honour killings are still sanctioned. It is estimated that in Jordan, approximately 20 women are murdered by their own relatives every year. Most

Harvey Tripp

#14. I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way.

Saul Leiter

#15. In these creations, life and symbolic value are not in contradiction: they intensify each other.

Victor Hugo

#16. To become a saint in the Catholic Church, the normal procedure is, beatification, requiring one miracle in your name, then canonization, roughly in five years or longer, to become a saint, a second miracle.

Chris Matthews

#17. If I'd only known which [photographs] would be very good and liked, I wouldn't have had to do all the thousands of others.

Saul Leiter

#18. No gift comes without a price.

Rick Riordan

#19. Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.

Saul Leiter

#20. If there's no game, isn't winning a pretty meaningless concept?

Lois McMaster Bujold

#21. The greatest difficulty with the world is not its ability to produce, but the unwillingness to share.

Roy L. Smith

#22. A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.

Saul Leiter

#23. Photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you'd never paid attention to.

Saul Leiter

#24. I leave these speculations to others. It's quite possible that my work represents a search for beauty in the most prosaic and ordinary places. One doesn't have to be in some faraway dreamland in order to find beauty.

Saul Leiter

#25. I admired a tremendous number of photographers, but for some reason I arrived at a point of view of my own.

Saul Leiter

#26. I am not immersed in self-admiration.

Saul Leiter

#27. I like the Zen artists: they'd do some work, and then they'd stop for a while.

Saul Leiter

#28. The important thing in life is not what you get, but what you throw out.

Saul Leiter

#29. Climbing is individual thing, it's a reflection of yourself. When you put up a route you're looking at yourself. If you chisel holds, it's your responsibility, nobody else's.

Ron Kauk

#30. I've never been overwhelmed with a desire to become famous. It's not that I didn't want to have my work appreciated, but for some reason - maybe it's because my father disapproved of almost everything I did - in some secret place in my being was a desire to avoid success.

Saul Leiter

#31. There are the things that are out in the open, and there are the things that are hidden. The real world has more to do with what is hidden.

Saul Leiter

#32. When I am listening to Vivaldi or Japanese music or making spaghetti at 3 in the morning and realize that I don't have the proper sauce for it, fame is of no use.

Saul Leiter

#33. I'm sometimes mystified by people who keep diaries. I never thought of my existence as being that important.

Saul Leiter

#34. I don't have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

Saul Leiter

#35. Well, death might take lives, but it doesn't take memories.

M.J. Abraham

#36. My brothers were rabbis. My grandfather was a rabbi.

Saul Leiter

#37. I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn't know.

Ishmael Beah

#38. Seeing is a neglected enterprise.

Saul Leiter

#39. What makes anyone think that I'm any good?

Saul Leiter

#40. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learned to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.

Saul Leiter