A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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

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

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.
- Susan Sontag Quote

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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

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

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.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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.
- Susan Sontag Quote

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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

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

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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.
- Susan Sontag Quote

It is not the position, but the disposition.
- Susan Sontag Quote

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
- Susan Sontag Quote

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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.
- Susan Sontag Quote

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
- Susan Sontag Quote

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
- Susan Sontag Quote

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
- Susan Sontag Quote

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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.
- Susan Sontag Quote

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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.
- Susan Sontag Quote

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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

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

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

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
- Susan Sontag Quote

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
- Susan Sontag Quote

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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

To photograph is to confer importance.
- Susan Sontag Quote

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.
- Susan Sontag Quote


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

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

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
- Susan Sontag Quote

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
- Susan Sontag Quote