Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
Susan Sontag
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
Susan Sontag
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Susan Sontag
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
Susan Sontag
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Susan Sontag
To photograph is to confer importance.
Susan Sontag
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
Susan Sontag
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Susan Sontag
A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
Susan Sontag
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
Sanity is a cozy lie.
Susan Sontag
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.
Susan Sontag
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
Susan Sontag
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
Susan Sontag
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Susan Sontag
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty – of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
Susan Sontag
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag
Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits.
Susan Sontag
What we need is to use what we have.
Susan Sontag
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Susan Sontag
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Susan Sontag
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Susan Sontag
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
Susan Sontag
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
Susan Sontag
It is not the position, but the disposition.
Susan Sontag
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
Susan Sontag
‘Camp’ is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
Susan Sontag
Volume depends precisely on the writer’s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Susan Sontag
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can’t force it.
Susan Sontag
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
Susan Sontag
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
Susan Sontag
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Susan Sontag
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
Susan Sontag
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Susan Sontag
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
Susan Sontag
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects – making it possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
Susan Sontag
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
Susan Sontag
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Susan Sontag
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
Susan Sontag
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Susan Sontag
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph – only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
Susan Sontag
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
Susan Sontag
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
Susan Sontag
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Susan Sontag