A Quote by Alexander Chee

The Narrator of 'A Sport and a Pastime' is an American photographer living in a borrowed house in what he calls 'the real France,' Autun, a small town where he hopes to take some career-changing photographs in the spirit of Atget.

Alexander Chee

Quote Author

Alexander Chee
American - Writer

My teacher introduced me to this photographer Eugène Atget. He was a French photographer in the late 1800s up until 1927 in Paris. He didn't consider himself an artist, but he was probably one of the artists of the 20th century. This guy documented all of Paris during those years. It's unbelievable. The books are phenomenal. The Museum of Modern Art has all his stuff now and [American photographer] Berenice Abbott saved his work. Not very much is known about his life, but the work is unreal and it totally spoke to me. He was the only artist for a number of years that I cared about at all.

Jeff Vespa

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer."

Josef Koudelka

I'll take photographs with kids. People who want to take photographs with me. People who like the movies. People who supported me. I'll do that all day, all night, that's fine. But the bombardment of the paparazzi is just... I truly don't understand. It just feels like this kind of gluttonous, horrific sport. It's like sport.

Johnny Depp

What makes most people comfortable is some sort of sense of nostalgia. I grew up in a small town, and I could count my friends on one hand, and I still live that way. I think I'll die in a small town. When I can't move my bones around a stage any more, you'll find me living in a place that's spread out and rural and spacious.

Justin Timberlake

I'm living out a childhood fantasy. Our house is in a historic district of a small town that I used to read about in storybooks

Patty Duke

I'm living out a childhood fantasy. Our house is in a historic district of a small town that I used to read about in storybooks.

Patty Duke

You have to remember that baseball really was the American pastime in the Forties, not football, basketball or any other sport.

Harrison Ford

This is how you can tell a real photographer: mostly, a real photographer does not say 'I wish I had my camera on me right now'. Instead a real photographer pulls out her camera and takes the photograph.

Neil Gaiman

There were just moments of the punk scene and I realized that I had to capture it. There was also this photographer in our preschool - I went to a Montessori school in Baltimore, Maryland - and they had this photographer come and take all these incredible photographs. They looked like they were from Life magazine.

Jeff Vespa

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television.

Bob Greene

Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz's standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.)

Alfred Stieglitz

I never claim my photographs reveal some definitive truth. I claim that this is what I saw and felt about the subject at the time the pictures were made. That's all that any photographer can claim. I do not know any great photographer who would presume otherwise.

David Hurn

Carrie Underwood was just a small-town Oklahoma girl with big dreams in 2005 when she competed on the fourth season of 'American Idol.' She is one of the few true 'American Idol' success stories and went on to have incredible career success.

Fabrizio Moreira

The first time that you escape from home or the small town that you live in - there's a reason a small town is called a small town: It's because not many people want to live there.

Billie Joe Armstrong

I live in New York now, and miss France quite a bit. Of course, the reality of living in a small village in the south of France was very different than the fantasy I had of living in France. Over the years I spent there, that fantasy was worn away and I found a more realistic version of France than the one I began with. I wouldn't say the spell ever goes away, but transforms. Now that I understand French culture more intimately, and speak fluent French, I have a different, more solid, relationship to the country.