Susan Sontag Quotations

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.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

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

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.

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

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

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

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

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

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

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

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.

What we need is to use what we have.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

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

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

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.

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.

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

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions

Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that a lot more money is involved and this is a largely money-oriented society. ... Nevertheless, this is a very good book town, whether it's known to be that or not, and that's why you have something like this.

It is only the fear of malpractice that keeps doctors candid in this country.

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize,

Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals,

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.

The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way things really are --- and always will be. How things really are --- and always will be --- is neither all-evil nor all-good but deficient, inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite us to clean up our act; to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting: that secret gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right, and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it.

Somewhere in the nod we were dropping cargo. Somewhere in the nod we were losing infrastructure, losing redundant systems, losing specific gravity. Weightlessness seemed at the time the safer mode. Weightlessness seemed at the time the mode in which we could beat both the clock and affect itself, but I see now that it was not.

Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That we are here, prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening, while elsewhere in the world, right now in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio....To be a travelerand novelists are often travelersis to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned home.

the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.

This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.

American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism.

It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow them very real to you.

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

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

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

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

And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.

Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.

In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art , Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community.

I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.

War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.

The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game

Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

Ideas disturb the levelness of life

The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.

Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't 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.

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

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

To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response.

Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.

The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.