Quotes By 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
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
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
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Susan Sontag
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
Susan Sontag
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.
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
What is the 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
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.
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
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
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
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
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
Susan Sontag
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
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
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Susan Sontag
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
Susan Sontag
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Susan Sontag