Susan Sontag Quotes

To photograph is to confer importance.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

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

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''.

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything,'.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

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

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

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 traveler—and novelists are often travelers—is 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.

Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been , what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal , needs to be protected from people.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.