What you need to be a good photographer is an overwhelming curiosity and a good digestion. Sometimes you feel blessed with curiosity, sometimes you feel cursed with it.

I came to photography by accident.

I can't hold a camera anymore.

I don't see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary. I see them simply as people in front of my lens.

I had in mind a long career.

I realize that I had the best of serious picture journalism.

I want the subject to be in control. Because they will give me something I couldn't possibly know about them.

If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given.

If you are careful with people, they will offer you part of themselves. That is the big secret.

It doesn't matter if you use a box camera or you use a Leica; the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing.

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

Lesson number one: Pay attention to the intrusion of the camera.

Themes recur again and again in my work.

What do you hang on the walls of your mind?

What drove me and kept me going over the decades? If I had to use a single word, it would be 'curiosity.'

What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing... if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.

You should never reveal your true age.

I find going back through things sometimes exhilarating because I find things I didn't know I had, and sometimes it's very off putting because there are things I never quite finished, and there's nothing at all to do about it now.

I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.

I look for a sense of reality with everything I did. I didn't work in a studio, I didn't light anything. I found a way of working which pleased me because I didn't have to frighten people with heavy equipment. It was that little black box and me and £5 worth of film in my pocket or maybe it was only £2 in those days.