Quotes from Susan Sontag

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.

Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.

Contempt The contempt I feel for others—for myself different, less internal than guilt. It's not that I think (or have ever thought) I was bad—through and through. I think I'm unattractive, unloveable, because I'm incomplete. It's not what I am that's wrong, it's that I'm not more (responsive, alive, generous, considerate, original, sensitive, brave etc.). My profoundest experience is of indifference, rather than censure.

If one could amputate part of one's consciousness...

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.

The beauty of modern cities consists in a sense of their power, cruelty, impersonality, massiveness, + variety (as in New York or London) seen against the architectural vestiges of a beautiful past.

I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations.

Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon—one that's as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology.

Ninguna definición compleja de lo que es o podrá ser la fotografía atenuará jamás el placer deparado por una foto de un hecho inesperado que capta a mitad de la acción un fotógrafo alerta.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.

No está mal ser bella lo que está mal es la obligación de serlo.

Opinions are like some kind of crust that grows on top of things and you want to kind of peel them off.

A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. Not only because it can always be added to, but because it is already too much. The collector's need is precisely for excess, for surfeit, for profusion. It's too much—and it's just enough for me. … A collection is always more than is necessary.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

La necesidad de confirmar la realidad y dilatar la experiencia mediante fotografías es un consumismo estético al que hoy todos son adictos. Las sociedades industriales transforman a sus ciudadanos en yonquis a las imágenes; es la forma más irresistible de contaminación mental.

I'm in love. Don't ask me how it's possible. It's just not in character; my nightmare-ridden, stubborn, melancholy character. And yet, it's happened.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a lamp; not a woman, but a woman. To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

Because it is a world event—that is, because it affects the West—it is regarded as not just a natural disaster. It is filled with historical meaning. (Part of the self-definition of Europe and the neo-European countries is that it, the First World, is where major calamities are history-making, transformative, while in poor, African or Asian countries they are part of a cycle, and therefore something like an aspect of nature.)

Camp which knows itself to be Camp ('camping') is usually less satisfying.

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half's worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.

One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (camping) is usually less satisfying.