David Bailey's Quotes

I love learning new techniques.

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

I never set out to be a photographer.

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

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

I used to love the '20s.

I was a terrible father. The most I ever did for my children was to teach them chess. At least they got that.

I was ten when I got my first serious beating. It was rough.

I'm an image-maker.

I'm not a philosopher, I'm just a simple boy from East Ham.

I'm not mad about movies, there are too many people involved in the making of them, and they lack a definitive creative focus.

I'm not political and I don't judge.

I've always been a bit flip.

I've always tried to do pictures that don't date.

I've been used by women all my life, fortunately.

I've had some weird experiences.

I've never been anti-women.

If you're curious, London's an amazing place.

In a way, a man's body is more beautiful than a woman's.

In France they don't think I'm difficult.

It's only a few nutcases who do art for themselves, like Van Gogh.

Journalists never make it clear when you are joking.

My exploits are nothing now to the average person.

My father was a tailor, my mother a machinist.

My first influence obviously was Picasso.

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

My paintings are rubbish.

Nothing wrong with retouching - nothing new about retouching.

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

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

The earth has a life of its own.

The only thing approaching art in a movie is the script.

The only thing they can't teach you at art school is art.

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

The skull is nature's sculpture.

The trouble with people like Tony Blair is they get confused, they think intelligence is education when they're two different things.

You adapt to who you're photographing.

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

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

Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.

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 don't see the point of photographing trees or rocks because they're there and anyone can photograph them if they're prepared to hang around and wait for the light.

In '73 I photographed the cannibals in New Guinea. They treated me OK but they didn't make you feel relaxed... I managed to escape unscathed though, I'm pretty good at that.

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.

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.

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.

A positive attitude can really make dreams come true - it did for me.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

I was surrounded by strong women so it had never even occurred to me that women were anything other than equal to men.

To get rich, you have to be making money while you're asleep.

People want security in this insecure world.

The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.

Rockers are the nicest people to photograph. They have no inhibitions.

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.

Anybody can be a great photographer if they zoom in enough on what they love.

When I die I want to go to Vogue.

It is a sign of a dull nature to occupy oneself deeply in matters that concern the body; for instance, to be over much occupied about exercise, about eating and drinking, about easing oneself, about sexual intercourse.

Being handsome wasn't much of a burden. It worked for me.

I always go for simplicity.

I was dyslexic, so I was put in the silly class at school.

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

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

Sometimes I still can't believe my luck.

Girls are more attractive to me than dresses.

I left school on my 15th birthday.

I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked.

I'm not really one for regrets.

Instead of putting someone in prison for being a hooligan, give him a choice. He may have beaten someone up and he's got eight years, but tell him you can do eight years inside or spend five years in the Army. Put him in the Parachute Regiment, they'd soon sort him out.

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.

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.

Being dyslexic, I was told that I was an idiot all the time.