Quotes from Diane Arbus

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

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

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

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.

If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

Every Difference is a Likeness too.

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.

I used to have a theory about photographing. It was a sense of getting in between two actions, or in between acton and repose.

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.

In the beginning of photographing I used to make very grainy things. I'd be fascinated by what the grain did because it would make a kind of tapestry of all these little dots and everything would be translated into this medium of dots. Skin would be the same as water would be the same as sky and you were dealing mostly in dark and light, not so much in flesh and blood.

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

The farther afield you go, the more you are going home ... as if the gods put us down with a certain arbitrary glee in the wrong place and what we seek is who we had really ought to be.

Take pictures of what you fear.

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.