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.”

“For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.”

“This photographing is really the business of stealing.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.”

“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.”

“I used to think consciousness itself was a virtue, so I tried to keep it all in my head at the same time: past, future, etc.”