Diane Arbus quotes:

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.

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.

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.

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.

Take pictures of what you fear.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I think all families are creepy in a way.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.

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

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.

These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.

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

The camera is a kind of license.

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.

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.

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

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.

...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.

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.

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.

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.

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.

Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprises

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

[Our self-image is] that gap between intention and effect

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

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.