850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

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.

We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?

All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

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

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

Art is a form of consciousness.