Quotes By Susan Sontag

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

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.

To photograph is to confer importance.

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

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

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

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

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.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

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

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

It is not the position, but the disposition.

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

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Sanity is a cozy lie.

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

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.