“Criticism is hypocrisy; society is hypocrisy. I'm a tourist. I'm a consumer. I do the things that I photograph and can be criticized of.”

“Dictators are interesting, no?”

“Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.”

“Filming is always a challenge because I'm not used to it. But I approach it head-on. I'm not technically brilliant, but it's the spirit that counts.”

“I am a big fan of Jim Jarmusch, and I do love big screen documentaries.”

“I am away so much, so I rarely see live TV, but I use iPlayer to catch programmes.”

“I am kept awake by the list of possibilities for shooting more photos and deciding what I must prioritise next.”

“I am not a huge follower of music and tend to like one CD and play it to death, usually when I am washing up.”

“I avoid Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and if I need to communicate with someone, I email direct.”

“I do read many of the photography magazines from the U.K. and abroad.”

“I don't like being flattered. It doesn't suit my English sensibilities. Remember, we are the great country of understatement.”

“I just go out and try to make sense of the world around me.”

“I like to keep in touch with younger photographers. It's important that a younger generation comes up and questions the assumptions made by old farts like me.”

“I love curating, because I'm lucky and privileged that I have a platform and I can share my discoveries with other people.”

“I never think of photographs as being individual. Always as a group.”

“I photograph people as I find them. But people have issues about how they look.”

“I photograph wealth.”

“I think the ordinary is a very under-exploited aspect of our lives because it is so familiar.”

“I toyed with the notion of being an actor, and am so glad that this whim did not go any further.”

“I would drown in objects if I didn't have the ability to photograph them.”

“If there is any jarring at all in my photographs, it's because we are so used to ingesting pictures of everywhere looking beautiful.”

“If you go to the supermarket and buy a package of food and look at the photo on the front, the food never looks like that inside, does it? That is a fundamental lie we are sold every day.”

“In New York, you have the street; in the U.K., we have the beach. I end up being like a migrating bird, being attracted to it.”

“In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.”

“Margaret Thatcher was very good for the arts in so far as it gave people a real focus for something to be against.”

“My biggest television weakness is 'Dragons' Den.'”

“My black-and-white work is more of a celebration, and the color work became more of a critique of society.”

“My father was an obsessive bird-watcher. The genes of observation passed down.”

“My profile is bigger in Europe than it is in the U.K.”

“Of course, New Brighton is very shabby, very rundown, but people still go there because it's the place where you take kids out on a Sunday.”

“One of the things I regret is that magazines now are so lifestyle-orientated that the opportunity to do bigger projects is gone. This is a serious misjudgment on the part of magazine editors.”

“Over the years, I have perfected the art of dancing and photographing at the same time: it's a great double act. If you're dancing, you are joining in. If you stand there rigid, you are not in the flow of things.”

“Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.”

“Photographers never want to talk about the fact that they may well be in decline. It's the greatest taboo subject of all.”

“Photography is, by its nature, exploitative. It's whether you use this process with a sense of responsibility or not. I feel that I do so. My conscience is clear.”

“Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.”

“Places change all the time, and the type of people who live there change.”

“Taking photos is a form of collecting.”

“The ability for us to laugh at ourselves is Britain's saving grace.”

“The idea of England in decline is very attractive.”

“The thing about tourism is that the reality of a place is quite different from the mythology of it.”

“The trouble with Hollywood films is that they always have a pleasant ending.”

“There are 65 to 70 photography galleries in New York alone. In the U.K., there are no more than five, and they're all in London.”

“There are elements of irony in my work, of course.”

“Tourism is the biggest industry in the world.”

“TV-makers usually don't know much about photography.”

“We live in a homogenized world, where it's hard to get excited when everything is slick and professional. The interesting things are the dull things.”

“Wealthy people have not disappeared, they are just not so willing to show off their wealth.”

“When I am in London, all I do is mix with other people in the arts.”

“When I fly British Airways, I can't help but read the free Daily Mail, which makes me glad I am leaving the country.”

“When I visited Vietnam for Oxfam, the thing that really struck me was how the local farmers had to prepare to evacuate or climb to their mezzanines with their valuable family possessions.”

“When someone says to you, 'Oh, I don't take a good picture,' what they mean is they haven't come to terms with how they look. They take a fine picture, it's just that their image of how they think they look is not in touch with the reality.”