Quotes By Susan Sontag

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

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

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Sanity is a cozy lie.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.