Diane Arbus Quotes

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. ~ Diane Arbus

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

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. ~ Diane Arbus

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. ~ Diane Arbus

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. ~ Diane Arbus

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

For me it is essential to understand that everyone is alone. Not in the sense of loneliness, but rather in the sense that no one can completely understand someone else. I know very well what Diane Arbus means when she says that one cannot crawl into someone else's skin, but there is always an urge to do so anyway. I want to awaken definite sympathies for the person I have photographed. ~ Rineke Dijkstra

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

The camera is a kind of license. ~ Diane Arbus

Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who.. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus. ~ Robert Gober

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

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

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

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. ~ Diane Arbus

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

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. ~ Diane Arbus

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. ~ Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus is one of the most mysterious, enigmatic, and frighteningly daring artists of the 20th century. Her work emerged from a deeply private place and profoundly affected all those who came into contact with it. ~ Steven Shainberg

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

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. ~ Diane Arbus

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

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories ~ Diane Arbus

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

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. ~ Diane Arbus

The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility. ~ Diane Arbus

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

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. ~ Diane Arbus

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

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. ~ Diane Arbus

A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white - people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing. ~ William Eggleston

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

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding ~ Diane Arbus

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

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

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

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. ~ Diane Arbus

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

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

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

I'm fascinated by the way Diane Arbus saw things. She came from this fashion background and then twisted it. ~ Raf Simons

Take pictures of what you fear. ~ Diane Arbus

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. ~ Diane Arbus

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. ~ Diane Arbus

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. ~ Diane Arbus

In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people? ~ Burton Silverman

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. ~ Diane Arbus

what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary. ~ Diane Arbus

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. ~ Diane Arbus

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. ~ Diane Arbus

American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos. ~ Diane Wakoski

My mother always said that everyone should be required to write an autobiography of their lives. ~ Diane Keaton

Poems come from incomplete knowledge. ~ Diane Wakoski

If organs as elemental as brain and heart can be persuaded to regenerate, and others, like ears and corneas, can be fashioned from living ink, how will that change us as a species? Will the printing of organs affect our evolution? Could it alter our genes? ~ Diane Ackerman

At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it. ~ Diane Setterfield

My love for you is endless and shall never die. ~ Diane Rinella

I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life ~ Diane Di Prima

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones. ~ Diane Ackerman

I don't lie. I would never stuff my bra because it's going to come off and the truth is going to be revealed. I don't like that padding. I try to be completely - if not brutally - honest. ~ Diane Lane

Those who can't teach, pass laws about how to evaluate teachers. ~ Diane Ravitch

Children live what they learn. ~ Diane Greene

Don't talk about your diet. It's just boring, and the last thing you need when dieting is to be considered boring. ~ Diane Von Furstenberg

Because when you watch U.S. television, all the presenters and reporters, they're all out of central casting. ~ Diane Abbott

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground. ~ Diane Wakoski

They put him through all sorts of psychological tests and said he was still a murderer. He could have saved them a lot of time and trouble if they'd bothered to ask him directly. ~ Diane May

Because that's what intimacy is: It's a willingness to be vulnerable, a willingness to bite my tongue and a willingness to set an example of what I believe in. ~ Diane Lane

I support charters, but the right kind of charters. I support charters that support kids who have the highest needs. A charter should be targeting students who are in serious trouble. It should serve students who didn't succeed in public schools when it can help them. Or, at least, charters should agree to accept similar proportions of the kids with the highest needs. ~ Diane Ravitch

The truth is simple Alex; it doesn't need a lot of words. Besides, people love chocolate, their shoes, last week's big hit. I'm yours, I always will be. ~ Diane Adams

I know what it's like to have a broken heart. I know what it's like to feel pain: When my songs don't become hits, it breaks my heart. There are a million ways to break a heart. I can relate. ~ Diane Warren

If I can help one person in this world, then it's enough, and I've done my job. ~ Diane Ladd

I love you," he said, as he parted her lips with his own and then kissed her. After a moment he added, "I love you with everything I have, and with all that I am. ~ Diane Haeger

Einstein was always looking for a unifying principle for the universe. I think anxiety about hair is the unifying principle. ~ Diane Sawyer

When I turned 14, I became very obsessed with writing songs, and it took over my existence. ~ Diane Warren

Hiking and happiness go hand in hand (or foot in boot). ~ Diane Spicer

Religion seems to have twisted the idea of God into a way to control people. ~ Diane Chamberlain

I'm fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers. ~ Diane Ackerman

I got through my teen years by being a bit of a clown. ~ Diane Cilento

As a parent I provide all I can, but I think in the best possible scenario you need to have a man. ~ Diane Keaton

It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person ― some stranger ― had gone to the trouble of marking my name on this envelope. ~ Diane Setterfield

There's something odd about the primary's flare pattern."
"Wouldn't be surprised," Dairine said. "I chucked a black hole into it."
Roshaun put his eyebrows up. "Stars in your neighborhood seem to have a rough time of it."
"If ours acts weird, talk to Nita," Dairine said, rather annoyed. "First time it went out was on her watch. ~ Diane Duane

A great many people, he had noticed, spent large parts of their time worrying about things they were powerless to alter. Had they concentrated all this energy on things they could influence, think how different their lives would be. ~ Diane Setterfield

Being German, I think we don't really express a lot of things. ~ Diane Kruger

It's not enough to do research from a distance. It's by living beside animals that you learn their behavior and psychology. On ~ Diane Ackerman

What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? ~ Diane Setterfield

Being attractive for a few hours some evening is hardly worth being that unattractive all day (in hot rollers). Being yourself and being natural with a man is wonderful, but being downright unattractive with him is foolish. ~ Diane Von Furstenberg

I remember the analogy you gave, comparing worry to a rocking chair. 'It keeps you moving but doesn't get you anywhere. ~ Diane Moody