Diane Arbus Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

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.

I used to have a theory about photographing. It was a sense of getting in between two actions, or in between acton and repose.

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.

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

The camera is a kind of license.

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.

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

what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.

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

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

Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too, and full as vain.

The farther afield you go, the more you are going home ... as if the gods put us down with a certain arbitrary glee in the wrong place and what we seek is who we had really ought to be.

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.

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

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

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.

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding

The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.

The birthday party was me and her, a whore friend of hers and her pimp, and the cake.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. 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.

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

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.

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

She lives always dressed as a woman and she whores as a woman. I would never think she was a man. I can't really see the man in her. Most of the time I absolutely know but she has none of the qualities of female impersonators that I can recognize. have gone into restaurants with her and every man in the place has turned around to look at her and made all kinds of hoots and whistles. And it was her, it wasn't me.

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

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