Quotes from Diane Arbus

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

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

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

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. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma.

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.

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

what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.

The birthday party was me and her, a whore friend of hers and her pimp, and the cake.

She lives always dressed as a woman and she whores as a woman. I would never think she was a man. I can't really see the man in her. Most of the time I absolutely know but she has none of the qualities of female impersonators that I can recognize. have gone into restaurants with her and every man in the place has turned around to look at her and made all kinds of hoots and whistles. And it was her, it wasn't me.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize. — Diane Arbus, Revelations (Random House, 2003)

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.

What's left after what one isn't is taken away is what one is.

I am full of a sense of promise, like I often have: the feeling of always being at the beginning.

I hated painting, and I quit right after high school because I was continually told how terrific I was... it made me feel shaky.

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.

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