Quotes by Susan Sontag

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”

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

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.”

“Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.”

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

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”

“It takes a long time to grow young.”

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

“The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”

“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.”

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”

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

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other peoples reality, and eventually in ones own.”

“What we need is to use what we have.”

“The radical right is so homophobic that theyre blaming global warming on the AIDS quilt.”

“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds”

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

“To take a photograph is to participate in another persons mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt.”

“Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”

“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.”