Diane Arbus Quotations

My favourite thing is to go where I've never been.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory.

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.

I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.

The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.

When you grow up your mother says, 'Wear rubbers or you'll catch cold.' When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It's something like that.

When you're growing up your mother says, "Wear rubbers or you'll catch cold." When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It's something like that.

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience.

The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.

Nudists are fond of saying that when you come right down to it everyone is alike, and, again, that when you come right down to it everyone is different.

[Our self-image is] that gap between intention and effect

I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.

Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprises

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.

What moves me about...what's called technique...is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe.

... I must begin at whatever pace is possible, to work on the book of my own that i vaguely keep assuming lies at the end of the rainbow. It is after all my rainbow and if I don't do it no one else will...Survival is the secret so you really can't afford to doubt yourself for long because you are all you've got. The only thing to do is to go the limit with it. Exceed.

The camera is a kind of license.

And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery.

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.

There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape.

Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.

These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.

I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn't dropped it, but there's something similar in what I'm trying to say. That once it's been done, you want to go someplace else. There's just some sense of straining.

I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.

Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.

It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, "All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up." And they did.

We stand on a precipice, then before a chasm, and as we wait it becomes higher, wider, deeper, but I am crazy enough to think it doesn't matter which way we leap because when we leap we will have learned to fly. Is that blasphemy or faith?

I'm very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known. They fascinate me when I've barely heard of them.

The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.

One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.

It's always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.

I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.

...I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.

Lately I've been struck with how I really love what you can't see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it's very thrilling for me to see darkness again.

I mean, it's very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.

If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.

We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away.

If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.

I think all families are creepy in a way.

I don't know what good composition is.... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There's a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.

The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination and I think it's true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You've just got to choose a subject - and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough.

If the fall of man consists in the separation of god and the devil the serpent must have appeared out of the middle of the apple when Eve bit like the original worm in it, splitting it in half and sundering everything which was once one into a pair of opposites, so the world is Noah's ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.

There's a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean everyone knows you've got some edge. You're carrying some magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.

For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.

Take pictures of what you fear.

There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.

I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.

It's important to take bad pictures. It's the bad ones that have to do with what you've never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn't seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

What moves me about...what's called technique...is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.

They are the proof of something was there and no longer is.Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they'll still be there looking at you.

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, ''I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life.'' I mean people are going to say, ''You're crazy.'' Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.