Susan Sontag

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

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

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

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

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

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

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.

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

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

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.

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

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.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

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.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

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

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

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

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.

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.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

To photograph is to confer importance.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

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

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.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

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

What we need is to use what we have.

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

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 becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.