Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

“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.”

— Susan Sontag

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— 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.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

“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.”

— Susan Sontag

“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.”

— Susan Sontag

“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.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

“Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag