Quotes from Susan Sontag

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

I love to read the way people love to watch television.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

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

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

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

to take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

Wherever people feel safe (...) they will be indifferent.

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.

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

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

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 have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don't like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I am tired.

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

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