850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

What we need is to use what we have.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.