850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.

The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.

My ignorance is not charming.

Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one – or both. Usually both.

Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn.