Diane Arbus
It's always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Mean
Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe.Collection: People
The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Photography
I think all families are creepy in a way.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Photography
...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.Collection: Mean
And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Crazy
... I must begin at whatever pace is possible, to work on the book of my own that i vaguely keep assuming lies at the end of the rainbow. It is after all my rainbow and if I don't do it no one else will...Survival is the secret so you really can't afford to doubt yourself for long because you are all you've got. The only thing to do is to go the limit with it. Exceed.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Different
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.Collection: Photography
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience.Collection: People
One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.Collection: Photography
The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.Collection: Discouragement
I'm very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known. They fascinate me when I've barely heard of them.Collection: People
These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Vices
If the fall of man consists in the separation of god and the devil the serpent must have appeared out of the middle of the apple when Eve bit like the original worm in it, splitting it in half and sundering everything which was once one into a pair of opposites, so the world is Noah's ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.Collection: Fall
Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.Collection: Happiness
The camera is a kind of license.Collection: Cameras
[Our self-image is] that gap between intention and effectCollection: Self
The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.Collection: Photography
It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape.Collection: Beautiful
When you're growing 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.Collection: Mother
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories.Collection: Stories