Quotes from Susan Sontag

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.

Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.

I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.

We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

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.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.

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.

The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.

Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices.

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.

Love dies because its birth was an error.

What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

To travel is to shop.