All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

People want security in this insecure world.

I hate being so nostalgic about the Sixties.

I never set out to be a photographer.

I could develop a picture by the time I was 12.

I didn't try and do fashion pictures. I tried to do portraits of girls wearing dresses.

You can't really copy what I do because I don't do anything.

My exploits are nothing now to the average person.

The reason I did fashion was it was the only way to get paid to do anything creative. You couldn't support yourself as an 'artist' - I hate that word. The only way you could be 'arty' was as a fashion photographer, because it still had a certain amount of integrity involved.

I've never been anti-women.

Everyone gets old - there's nothing you can do about it.

All I could do at school was paint and draw and that was the only time I ever passed any exam. It was the only thing I ever got right at school.

I left school on my 15th birthday.

I sort of fall in love with them when I'm photographing them - men and women.

I guess I'm the last of the Cockneys.

In New York, everyone's desperate for success, desperate for money and desperate to be accepted, but in London they're more laid back about things like that.

London changes because of money. It's real estate. If they can build some offices or expensive apartments they will, it's money that changes everything in a city.

My friends are all megalomaniacs - from Damien Hirst to Jack Nicholson - all of them.

I had a terrible time with feminists in the Seventies. They hated me, those women. I think they hated everything.

I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.

Rather than knowing more, I think I've got more open-minded.

I hate men who are in touch with their feminine side.

I like change. There's something Buddhist about it - continuous change is wonderful.

I am mad about my wife.

All my ex-girlfriends or wives are all kind of great friends and I've never understood somebody who can live with somebody for five or six years and then not like them.

I did painting before I did photography.

The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.

Photography is more about money now but then so are most things.

I know everything should be photographed. It helps me make sense of my existence.

I suppose because my work was so popular people didn't really look at it.

Nothing wrong with retouching - nothing new about retouching.

I love people for giving me their time. It's a privilege - I make the most of it.

When I stop working, I go out and start working again. Most people paint a picture, or whatever they do, and go home. For me, it has to be continuous.

Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly, whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

Girls are more attractive to me than dresses.

You have to kind of be invisible when you photograph children, so you use a longer lens.

I don't think my work does reflect my nationality - I don't like the idea of nationalism.

I don't think it matters where I came from any more.

I'm never shocked, I'm not the shockable type!

I have never met an ugly woman.

I am not responsible for all the journalists in the past that have told lies.

Journalists never make it clear when you are joking.

I have always had a blank spot where my regret is supposed to be.

Some nights I'm funny with the between-song commentary, some nights I'm not. I have no control over this. I pace the stage a lot and struggle with the mic stand in a ridiculous way.

It frustrated me at college that all the acts in the Top 10 were like The Moody Blues and Phil Collins. It was like why did we get stuck with the last generation's music, why can't we have our own?

Silver Jews was always a coolection of old friends. Uncoolection.

I've had to stop going to the nearest grocery store that seems to play Shania Twain's 'Forever and For Always' whenever I'm there. It's hard to shop for frozen entrees through cold-air blasted tears. Feels good on a flushed face though.

I'm interested in direct communication about domestic life.

I mean, I wasn't fortunate enough to have ever experienced starting out with a band and sticking with them, so that would be interesting to me. People whose bands start out like that, when they break up it's always terrible.

My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.