Diane Arbus
I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Experience
Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.
The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
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 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.
The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
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.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present. I want to gather them, like somebody's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.
I think it does, a little, hurt to be photographed.
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 am full of a sense of promise, like I often have: the feeling of always being at the beginning.
My favourite thing is to go where I've never been.
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.
I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.
There is so much work to working that there are moments, moments, where I stop and look around, and it seems too arduous to go on. It isn't, of course.
You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
This photographing is really the business of stealing.
Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.
The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
That is why people have jobs and pay checks... it helps keep you from unanswerable questions.
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.
I hated painting, and I quit right after high school because I was continually told how terrific I was... it made me feel shaky.
I used to think consciousness itself was a virtue, so I tried to keep it all in my head at the same time: past, future, etc.
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their storiesCollection: Character
Take pictures of what you fear.Collection: Photographer
Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprisesCollection: Secret
Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Photography
We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away.Collection: Identity
For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Should Have
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?Collection: Photography
Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Quality
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.Collection: Believe
I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.Collection: Mean
If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.Collection: Reality
One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Mean
Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.Collection: Happiness
If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.Collection: Crazy
Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.Collection: 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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Photography