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I would play music every day from the time I was about 4 or 5 years old. Every time I would go from one end of the house to the other, I would pass the piano and play a few notes.

William Eggleston

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William Eggleston
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: July 27
Artist
Photographer
Memphis
Tennessee
Bill Eggleston
Every
Years
Piano
Would
Notes
Time
Pass
House
Ends
Music
Play

More quotes by William Eggleston

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Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.
William Eggleston
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I have some that I have become a well-known-even infamous-client of, mostly in Memphis. But a great deal of that is legend and doesn't have anything to do with truth.
William Eggleston
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You become technically proficient whether you want to or not, the more you take pictures.
William Eggleston
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I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.
William Eggleston
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You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.
William Eggleston
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Only the few times I've been to so-called treatment centers, which were a complete waste of money and useless. I didn't know what I was doing at the time, because I was always drunk when I checked in.
William Eggleston
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I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify.
William Eggleston
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My friend who I went to boarding school with was interested in photography. He insisted that I buy a camera and marched me downtown.
William Eggleston
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I think with being blind the one thing you would have going is that you could still feel things, see your way around so to speak. And if you had had the experience of seeing at one time in your life, then you would know what it was like and be able to function. I've said this before, I think I could really photograph blind if I had to.
William Eggleston
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I don't have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn't do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.
William Eggleston
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Unfortunately they're practically all dead. And many were my closest associates: friends, co-directors, whatever you want to say - my partners in crime.
William Eggleston
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I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.
William Eggleston
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Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best what I've come up with is I just say: Life today.
William Eggleston
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I had the attitude that I would work with this present-day material and do the best I could to describe it with photography, not intending to make any particular comment about whether it was good or bad or whether I liked it or not. It was just there, and I was interested in it. That's what I still do today.
William Eggleston
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I knew it was happening, but I never paid much attention to it . . . just to the passage of time. Something new always slowly changes right in front of your eyes - it just happens.
William Eggleston
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There are a lot of unseen projects. When a project is finished, I often physically, and in my mind, set it aside, intending something to happen with it, something that does or does not always happen. Now, a lot of these are being resurrected for the public.
William Eggleston
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I've also never had favorite pictures. Or subjects. I have this discipline of treating everything equally-I used to say democratically.
William Eggleston
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And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.
William Eggleston
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Photography just gets us out of the house.
William Eggleston
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I am at war with the obvious.
William Eggleston