Diane Arbus Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe.

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

I think all families are creepy in a way.

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.

The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.

...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.