Diane Arbus Quotes

"Nothing is ever the same as they said it was."

"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."

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

"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."