Susan Sontag

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

Sanity is a cozy lie.

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

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.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

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.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.