Quotes By 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.

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

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

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

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.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

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

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.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

What we need is to use what we have.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

To photograph is to confer importance.