Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I saw a man lying on the steps of a church on Lex Ave under a sign saying
Open for Meditation and Prayer with his fly open and his penis out. I couldn’t ask him to sign a release. Could you?
(To her magazine editor) 
I don’t know what good composition is... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There’s a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.
...invention is mostly this subtle, inevitable thing... I mean it comes from your nature, your identity. We've all got an identity. You can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take everything else away. I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don't think of.
[Photographs] are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.
(March, 1971, six months before her suicide)
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories.
My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
I am not ghoulish, am I? It wouldn’t anyway have been better to turn away, would it?
I’m not as good a photographer as people think except sometimes and in my head.
