Quotes from Susan Sontag

It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.

Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

I don't care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces 'intelligence.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

I like to feel dumb. That's how I know there's more in the world than me.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.