Duane Michals Quotations

If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was 33 years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography.

Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.

The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.

Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.

I'm a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can't help myself.

I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.

I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look like and think it's impossible to really know what people are.

To fulfil a fantasy is the quickest way to destroy it.

I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.