Diane Arbus Quotes

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

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

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprises

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.

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.

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.

Take pictures of what you fear.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.