Quotes from Susan Sontag

The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. 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.

The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences suicide. Or murder.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects -- making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

My library is an archive of longings.

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

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.