"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."
— Susan Sontag

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. "
— Susan Sontag

"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."
— Susan Sontag (On Photography)

"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."
— Susan Sontag

"Sanity is a cozy lie."
— Susan Sontag

"Today everything exists to end in a photograph."
— Susan Sontag

"The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list."
— Susan Sontag

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

"The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

"
— Susan Sontag

"I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all"
— Susan Sontag

"Life is a movie; death is a photograph."
— Susan Sontag

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
— Susan Sontag

"Depression is melancholy minus its charms"
— Susan Sontag

"A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world"
— Susan Sontag

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

"10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction."
— Susan Sontag

"Art is seduction, not rape. "
— Susan Sontag

"Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both."
— Susan Sontag

"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.
"
— Susan Sontag

"Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous"
— Susan Sontag

"The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication"
— Susan Sontag

"Desire has no history..."
— Susan Sontag (On Photography)

"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."
— Susan Sontag

""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."



(maybe quotes are silly but, i like that one a whole lot)"
— Susan Sontag (On Photography)

""A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.""
— Susan Sontag

"All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary. "
— Susan Sontag

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

"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.'"
— Susan Sontag (On Photography)

""I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.""
— Susan Sontag

"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on the forehead. Pay attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
— Susan Sontag (Syberbergs Hitler - Film)

"Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."
— Susan Sontag

"Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it."
— Susan Sontag

"Sanity is a cozy lie. "
— Susan Sontag

"Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace. And “terrorist” is a more flexible word than “communist.” It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless---since there will always be some terrorism."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"...one person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.'"
— Susan Sontag

"Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer."
— Susan Sontag

"Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past."
— Susan Sontag (On Photography)

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art"
— Susan Sontag

"Writing is a mysterious activity."
— Susan Sontag

"If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that."
— Susan Sontag