850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

With more people, there are more voices to tune out.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

Literature usually begets literature.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.