Quotes from Susan Sontag

Toda a capacidade de compreender está enraizada na capacidade de dizer não.

Rüyalar?n yasaklanmamas?na hayret ediyorum. Rüya ne büyük bir vaat! Ne büyük zevk! Ne kadar özel! Hem insana bir eÅŸ de gerekmez; kad?n veya erkek, kimsenin iÅŸbirliÄŸine gerek yok. Rüyalar, ruhun tamama ermemiÅŸ cinsel eylemidir.

Walking onto his terrace those first months to see in the distance the well-behaved mountain sitting under the sun might provoke a reverie about the calm that follows catastrophe.

A câmera faz com que todos sejam turistas na realidade alheia e, eventualmente, na sua própria.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one – or both. Usually both. – Susan Sontag

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

To talk about camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves.

I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it.

For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it—then you know. The south has got you. *

Here is where the modern cult of love enters: it is the main way in which we test ourselves for strength of feeling, and find ourselves deficient.

Para trascender el cuerpo, hay que pasar por un período de desenfreno físico y blasfemia verbal, sobre el principio de que sólo cuando la moral ha sido deliberadamente pisoteada, es capaz el individuo de una transformación radical: entrar en un estado de gracia que deja atrás todas las categorías morales.

In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

No sería erróneo hablar de una compulsión a fotografiar: a transformar la experiencia misma en una manera de ver.

Not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard –and the most articulate audience– of Camp.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought

Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility. It has hardened into an idea ...

It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. - Lady Windemere's Fan 23. In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist's competence, his responsible sense of vocation—and therefore as an aggression against them. Modern

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much.

It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment - or arouses a necessary sympathy.

El más lógico de los estetas del siglo XIX, Mallarmé, afirmó que en el mundo todo existe para culminar en un libro. Hoy todo existe para culminar en una fotografía.

A six-week trip to China in 1973 convinced me—if I needed convincing—that the autonomy of the aesthetic is something to be protected, and cherished, as indispensable nourishment to intelligence. But a decade-long residence in the 1960s, with its inexorable conversion of moral and political radicalisms into "style," has convinced me of the perils of over- generalizing the aesthetic view of the world.