Quotes By Susan Sontag

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

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

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.

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

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

It is not the position, but the disposition.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Sanity is a cozy lie.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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