Quotes from Susan Sontag

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

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

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.

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.

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

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

To photograph is to confer importance.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

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

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

She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

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

What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

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.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

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

God, living is enormous!

A good book is an education of the heart.

Passion paralyzes good taste.