850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.

It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.