Brassai quotes:

The surrealism of my pictures was nothing but the real made eerie by vision. I was trying to express reality, for there is nothing more surrealist.

In the absence of a subject with which you are passionately involved, and without the excitement that drives you to grasp it and exhaust it, you may take some beautiful pictures, but not a photographic oeuvre.

Beauty is not the purpose of creation, it is its reward. Its appearance, often late in the day, is no more than an indication that the disrupted equilibrium between man and nature has once again been restored by art. Submitted to this test, what remains of contemporary works of art?

The purpose of art is to raise people to a higher level of awareness than they would otherwise attain on their own.

It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer's true vocation.

Only powerfully conceived images have the ability to penetrate the memory, to stay there, in short to become unforgettable.

If you take your inspiration from nature, you don't invent anything, because what you want to do is to interpret something. But still, everything passes throught your imagination. What you produce at the end is very different from the reality you started with.

Photography is the very conscience of painting. It constantly reminds the later of what it must not do.

My ambition was always to show aspects of daily life as if we were seeing them for the first time.

To me photography must suggest, not insist or explain.

My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.

A poor photographer meets chance one out of a hundred times and a good photographer meets chance all the time.

The precise instant of creation is when you choose the subject. (meaning that the essential thing occurs at the moment when he, the photographer, meets the reality he wishes to capture.

Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flowerpots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing.

For me the criterion of a good photograph is that it is unforgettable.

The wall, safe haven for what is forbidden, gives a voice to all those who would, without it, be condemned to silence

To keep from going stale you must forget your professional outlook and rediscover the virginal eye of the amateur.

... we photographers are nothing but a pack of crooks, thieves and voyeurs. We are to be found everywhere we are not wanted; we betray secrets that were never entrusted to us; we spy shamelessly on things that are not our business; And end up the hoarders of a vast quantity of stolen goods.

I don't invent anything. I imagine everything... most of the time, I have drawn my images from the daily life around me. I think that it is by capturing reality in the humblest, most sincere, most everyday way I can, that I can penetrate to the extraordinary.

There are many photographs which are full of life but which are confusing and difficult to remember. It is the force of an image which matters.

André Kertész has two qualities that are essential for a great photographer: an insatiable curiosity about the world, about people, and about life, and a precise sense of form.

What attracts the photographer is precisely the chance to penetrate inside phenomena, to uncover forms... He pursues them into their last refuges and surprises them at their most positive, their most material and true.

After twenty years you can begin to be sure of what camera will do.

I think education and intelligence (are) important, but not art. Not artistic education...