Words matter. These are the best Susan Sontag Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
What we need is to use what we have.
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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.
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.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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.
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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.
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
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.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
It is not the position, but the disposition.
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.
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.
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
