850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

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.