Susan Sontag

Shouting something didn't make it any more possible.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past present and future.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

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.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs 'behind' the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms the animation, the fits.

Communism is fascism with a human face.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures.

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

"Camp" is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

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

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.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other peoples reality and eventually in ones own.

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

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.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

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

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

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

What we need is to use what we have.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

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.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

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.

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.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

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

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.

Camp taste turns its back on the good bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesnt reverse things. It doesnt argue that the good is bad or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art and life a different a supplementary set of standards.

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

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

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.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

The life of the creative man is lead directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

My skull is crammed with quotations.

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

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.

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

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.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation sponsors playfulness.

I haven't been everywhere but it's on my list.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

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

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.

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

Writing is a mysterious activity.

Taste has no system and no proofs.

To photograph is to confer importance.

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much.

To emphasize style is to slight content or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.

All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.