Diane Arbus Quotes (22 Quotes)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.