Quotes from Susan Sontag

Every collector is potentially (if not actually) a thief.

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life--its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness--conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.

Creo que lo más importante a la hora de escribir es pensar que algún lector necesitado espera con ansias ese texto. Comencé a escribir pensando en lo que quería leer. Si mantienes esa premisa, quieras o no, serás honesto.

In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.

Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato's Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.

In fact, words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture's meaning.

Image of an image of an image... But to record all the dips and upswings, in a sense falsifies them, and I start deluding myself and thinking all this is, or might be, real. Enough to play the game, or try to play it. A mistake to tally up the score.

It was not a question of knowledge...but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention.

That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.

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.

But the past is the biggest country of all, and there's a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter

Regenerative experiences: Plunge into the sea. The sun. An old city. Silence.

La sabiduría esencial de la imagen fotográfica afirma: «Ésa es la superficie. Ahora piensen —o más bien sientan, intuyan— qué hay más allá, cómo debe de ser la realidad si ésta es su apariencia».

No we should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Queremos que el fotógrafo sea un espía en la casa del amor y de la muerte y que los retratados no sean conscientes de la cámara, se encuentren con la guardia baja.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.

No such thing as a temptation. A temptation is a desire, a lust like any other - but one that we regret afterwards + wish undone (or that we know beforehand we will regret after). So it`s no excuse to say, ``I didn`t mean to do it. I was tempted + I couldn`t resist.`` All one can honestly say is, ``I did it. I`m sorry I did it.`` - Reborn

When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition.

Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it.

My loyalty to the past—my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most.

I am sick of having opinions. I am sick of talking.

the pollution of American space...brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.