Quotes from Susan Sontag

The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses.

The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful

To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.

Everyone else not real-very distant, small figures. I would have to swim a thousand miles to reach the margin of the relationship, on the other side of which might lie other people, and it was too far, I was too tired. The almost infinitely extending network of that relationship; its dense weave That's what held me-

Only thing that counts are ideas. Behind ideas are [moral] principles. Either one is serious or one is not. Must be prepared to make sacrifices. I'm not a liberal.

I like watching people, but I don't like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them.

Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one.

Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves—how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one "role" to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I'm supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it's successfully executed.

True that Benjamin used a communist language in the last years of his life, so he looks different to us now. But that's because he died in 1940. Those last years were the ones in which communist language regained authority--seen as necessary to fight fascism (identified as The Enemy). Had Benjamin lived as long as Adorno he would have become as a-social, as disillusioned with left as Adorno did.

A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short.

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.

Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings.

To say a feeling, an impression is to diminish it - expel it

For Valéry, the nature of beauty is that it cannot be defined; beauty is precisely "the ineffable.

The Cavaliere has retired to his study and reads, trying not to think about what is going on around him -- one of the principal uses of a book.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. With him I have neither, neither privacy or passion. Neither the heightening of self which is won by privacy and loneliness, nor the splendid heroic beautiful loss of self that accompanies passion.

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.

Every style is a means of insisting on something.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Look, what I want is to be fully present in my life - to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself in your life, giving full attention to the world, which includes you. You are not the world, the world is not identical to you, but you're in it and paying attention to it. That's what a writer does - a writer pays attention to the world.

My love wants to incorporate her totally, to eat her. My love is selfish.

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.

El tiempo termina por elevar casi todas las fotografías, aun las más inexpertas, a la altura del arte.