Rick Smolan

“My father said, 'You should do 'A Day in the Life of Medicine.' A book about how the human race wants to heal itself in new ways.”

“I think we're going to have auxiliary hard drives to offload our memories.”

“If you travel 11 months a year - from one dangerous or isolated situation to the next - if you live in hotels, and every relationship with another human being is a two-week relationship, the only other people who have any idea what you're going through or how strung out you are are other photographers.”

“Some people think that Facebook is fantastic; other people are very worried about it.”

“If you ask anyone on any street corner in the world what the Soviet Union looks like, they would probably have very strong opinions. And they probably would be wrong.”

“There are a number of fascinating stories included in 'The Human Face of Big Data' that represent some of the most innovative applications of data that are shaping our future.”

“'America 24/7' will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age.”

“I was voted least likely to manage a business when I was at Dickinson College.”

“My company, Against All Odds Productions, has done print on demand; we were the first to do a book with a CD-ROM in the early 1990s. We do custom covers. It's always fun to do something new.”

“The 'America at Home' project was aimed at being the most extensive record of American home life ever attempted, and we were amazed at how many people were willing to participate as photographers or to welcome the photographers into their homes.”

“The hard thing about the book world is that you never know whether 10 people or a million people will find it interesting.”

“I'm an optimist.”

“If you ever plan to run for office, if you're a teenager, remember everything you do, every tweet, every Facebook posting, every picture you put on Instagram will be there forever for journalists and politicians - for your competition to dig up.”

“Sergey Brin has said to me, like, 10 times now, 'Why do you bother doing books? Why don't you just put all this stuff on the Internet?' It's because 10 years from now, my book will still be sitting on someone's coffee table or in a waiting room.”

“Big Data is just that - big. But, it's a term that is largely misunderstood and difficult to explain.”

“The world that our children living in is going to be completely different because of big data.”

“Americans are changing right before our eyes. They are choosing different lifestyles, families, traditions and ways of living.”

“The ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data in real time is something the human race has never had before. This new set of tools, often referred by the lofty term 'Big Data,' has begun to emerge as a new approach to addressing some of the biggest challenges facing our planet.”

“'Data exhaust' is probably my least favorite phrase in the big data world 'cause it sounds like something you're trying to get rid of or something noxious that comes out of the back of your car.”

“One of the nice things about living in Silicon Valley is that I end up at all these conferences and things, and I get to listen in on the zeitgeist.”