850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

To look at something which is “empty” is still to be looking, still to be seeing something – if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art – like physical beauty in a person – is extremely perishable.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.

Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall – like seeking love in a whorehouse.

The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

I don’t write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive.

I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

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.