Diane Arbus Quotes

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Diane Arbus

Profession : Photographer

Birth : March 14, 1923

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.

Diane Arbus

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

Diane Arbus

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

Diane Arbus

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

Diane Arbus

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

Diane Arbus

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.

Diane Arbus

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.

Diane Arbus

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

Diane Arbus

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.

Diane Arbus

This photographing is really the business of stealing.

Diane Arbus

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

Diane Arbus

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

Diane Arbus

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

Diane Arbus

I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present. I want to gather them, like somebody's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.

Diane Arbus

There is so much work to working that there are moments, moments, where I stop and look around, and it seems too arduous to go on. It isn't, of course.

Diane Arbus

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

Diane Arbus

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.

Diane Arbus

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

Diane Arbus

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.

Diane Arbus

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.

Diane Arbus