850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.