Top 50 Diane Arbus Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”

— Diane Arbus

Featured in: Artist Quotes, Photography Quotes

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

— Diane Arbus

3. “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

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

— Diane Arbus

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

— Diane Arbus

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

— Diane Arbus

7. “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?”

— Diane Arbus

8. “The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories.”

— Diane Arbus

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

9. “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

10. “I think all families are creepy in a way.”

— Diane Arbus

11. “Take pictures of what you fear.”

— Diane Arbus

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

— Diane Arbus

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

— Diane Arbus

14. “The camera is a kind of license.”

— Diane Arbus

15. “We’ve all got an identity. You can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take everything else away.”

— Diane Arbus

16. “I mean, if you’ve ever spoken to someone with two heads, you know they know something you don’t.”

— Diane Arbus

17. “There’s a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean everyone knows you’ve got some edge. You’re carrying some magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.”

— Diane Arbus

18. “And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains – a further chapter in the history of the mystery.”

— Diane Arbus

19. “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.”

— Diane Arbus

20. “I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”

— Diane Arbus

21. “Taking pictures is like tiptoeing into the kitchen late at night and stealing Oreo cookies.”

— Diane Arbus

22. “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. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe.”

— Diane Arbus

23. “It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.”

— Diane Arbus

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

— Diane Arbus

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Diane Arbus

27. “Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.”

— Diane Arbus

28. “Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.”

— Diane Arbus

29. “Lately I’ve been struck with how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it’s very thrilling for me to see darkness again.”

— Diane Arbus

30. “I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.”

— Diane Arbus

31. “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.”

— Diane Arbus

32. “There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.”

— Diane Arbus

33. “Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe.”

— Diane Arbus

34. “One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.”

— Diane Arbus

35. “These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn’t it be lovely? Yes.”

— Diane Arbus

36. “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.”

— Diane Arbus

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

— Diane Arbus

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

— Diane Arbus

39. “The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.”

— Diane Arbus

40. “It’s always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.”

— Diane Arbus

41. “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.”

— Diane Arbus

42. “Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprises.”

— Diane Arbus

43. “The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.”

— Diane Arbus

44. “I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don’t think of.”

— Diane Arbus

45. “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience.”

— Diane Arbus

46. “The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.”

— Diane Arbus

47. “When you’re growing 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

48. “It would be beautiful to photograph the winners of everything from Nobel to booby prize, clutching trophy, or money or certificate, solemn or smiling or tear stained or bloody, on the precarious pinnacle of the human landscape.”

— Diane Arbus

49. “If I didn’t have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.”

— Diane Arbus

50. “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.”

— Diane Arbus