Quotes from Susan Sontag

That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art.

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense).

Gaudi's lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal — most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia — the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature. Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated. I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts. I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true.

It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.

That being said, one person's "barbarian" is another person's "just doing what everybody else is doing." (How many can be expected to do better than that?) The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African-American men (and a few women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America.

Nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.

Because my wanting isn't strong—it fears risks, it demands approval…

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art.

Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store (which may also be an airport or a museum).

Coleccionar fotografías es coleccionar el mundo.

For all the voyeuristic lure—and the possible satisfaction of knowing, This is not happening to me, I'm not ill, I'm not dying, I'm not trapped in a war—it seems normal for people to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others, even others with whom it would be easy to identify

What do I believe? In the private life, in holding up culture, in music, Shakespeare, old buildings…

And suicide is the third, ultimate use of suffering—conceived of not as an end to suffering, but as the ultimate way of acting on suffering.

Wherever people feel safe—this was her bitter, self-accusing point—they will be indifferent.

People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid.

La fotografía en un libro es, obviamente, la imagen de una imagen.

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.

The flâneur is not attracted to the city's official realities but to its dark seamy corners, its neglected populations—an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer "apprehends," as a detective apprehends a criminal.

I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark-card store, and I used to save up my allowance and would buy them all. I even bought real lemons like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations [laughing]. I thought everything in the Modern Library must be great.

You're becoming more and more deeply in debt to yourself, and you are already bankrupt. You look at yourself too much. That's the beginning of all absurdity. Look about you. The world is an interesting place.

The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the visor--all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.

interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.