Susan Sontag Quotes

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

A good book is an education of the heart.

Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.

My library is an archive of longings.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

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.

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.

Love dies because its birth was an error.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all

To photograph is to confer importance.

What we need is to use what we have.

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

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.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.