Faas Quotes & Sayings

Instead of always asking yourself why so-and-so acts this or that way, learn to ask: "What's inside of me that wants to hurt itself over how anyone else acts?" — Guy Finley

And yet, something inside you is so horrible or you're such a coward or whatever the reason that you decide that you have to end it. Robin Williams, at 63, did that today. — Shepard Smith

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical. — Thomas B. Macaulay

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear. — Horst Faas

I think the best war photos I have taken have always been made when a battle was actually taking place - when people were confused and scared and courageous and stupid and showed all these things. When you look at people right at the very moment of truth, everything is quite human. You take a picture at this moment with all the mistakes in it, with everything that might be confusing to the reader, but that's the right combat photo. — Horst Faas

A Leica camera is a camera we can keep both eyes open. You can look for the free eye that doesn't look to viewfinder and in all directions. It's like backwards - and sometimes also backwards, and you can look for the viewfinder and see your picture. — Horst Faas

That's the Irish all over
they treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke. — Sean O'Casey

I try to express with the camera what the story is, to get to the heart of the story with picture. In battle I look at things first in terms of people, second in terms of strategies or casualties ... To tell a story, you don't photograph one hundred dead civilians to prove there were one hundred dead civilians. You photograph one dead civilian with an expression on his face that says, This is what it's like if you're a dead civilian in Vietnam. — Horst Faas

To get the best picture of a captured prisoner, you have to get him just as he is captured. The expression he wears then is lost forever ... The human mechanism is remarkably recuperative. A half hour later, the expressions are gone, the faces have changed. The mother with the dead baby in her arms does not look griefstruck anymore, no matter what she feels. — Horst Faas

A good book is one that you simply cannot put down..! — Faas Kramer

Joy is my character,
tis the fault of Voltaire.
Misery is my trousseau,
tis the fault of Rousseau.
Gavroche — Victor Hugo

Being in Vietnam and being around a major story of the time was always a great shot of adrenaline. — Horst Faas

When you're out in the military situation, you can't take pictures at night because flashlights. So at night and in bad weather and in dark weather, the cameras went into the fish tackling box, which was waterproof, and I would just use my mind and try to keep quotes there and write down little stories. — Horst Faas

My greatest fear is being somewhere without a book. — Patricia MacLachlan

Will the roofs of new buildings be vegetated? If not, why not? — Tom Turner

When I stopped fighting all the things around me, all the things around me started to come together. All the activity, and the landscape, and the ground and the sky, and even people's thoughts. Everything's trying to form one picture. And I can feel my place in it like I couldn't before. — Kristin Cashore