William Eggleston famous quotes

05-25-2025

I don't have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn't do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.
-- William Eggleston

#Struggle #Artist #Ideas
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.
-- William Eggleston

#Reading #Language #Boring
I am at war with the obvious.
-- William Eggleston

#Photography #War #Obvious
I don't think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day.
-- William Eggleston

#Thinking #Use #Cameras
Iâ€™ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and theyâ€™re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture thatâ€™s not well organized upside down, it wonâ€™t work.
-- William Eggleston

#Interesting #Quality #Down And
I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.
-- William Eggleston

#Taken #Two #Waiting
Photography just gets us out of the house.
-- William Eggleston

#Photography #House
I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.
-- William Eggleston

#Important #Way #Photographer
A picture is what it is and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.
-- William Eggleston

#Taken #Mean #People
I like to photograph democratically.
-- William Eggleston

#Photograph
I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.
-- William Eggleston

#Want #Facts #Musician
It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.
-- William Eggleston

#Reason #Grew
There is no particular reason to search for meaning.
-- William Eggleston

#Reason #Particular
Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might doâ€”itâ€™s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.
-- William Eggleston

#Drawing #Peculiar #Might
I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify.
-- William Eggleston

#People #Appreciate #Imagine
You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.
-- William Eggleston
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.
-- William Eggleston

#Photography #People #Answers
You become technically proficient whether you want to or not, the more you take pictures.
-- William Eggleston

#Want #Photographer

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