Diane Arbus Quotes
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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.
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...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.
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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.
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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.
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One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.
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I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.
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The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories
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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.
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And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery.
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Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
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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.
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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.
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Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe.
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The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.
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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.
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If I didn't have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
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Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.
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I mean, if you've ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don't.
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The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.
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Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.
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You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.
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The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
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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.
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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.
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