Susan Sontag Quotes

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

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

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

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

The only interesting ideas are heresies

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

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

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.

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.

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

When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

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

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

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

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

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

Art is a form of consciousness.

All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

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 "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

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

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.

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

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

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.

Taste has no system and no proofs.

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.

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

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

It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.

Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

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.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

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

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

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

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

Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.

To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.