Quotes from Susan Sontag

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

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.

Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.

That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!

One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.

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

Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

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.