Quotes By Susan Sontag

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

What we need is to use what we have.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

To photograph is to confer importance.

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

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

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

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

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

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

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

It is not the position, but the disposition.

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

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.