I was born in Brazil and grew up in the '70s under a climate of political distress, and I was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way - in a sort of a semiotic black market. You couldn't really say what you wanted to say; you had to invent ways of doing it. You didn't trust information very much.

- Vik Muniz

The really magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it.

- Vik Muniz

I'm a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.

- Vik Muniz