850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

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

Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is “sexier” than communism.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ’intelligence.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits.

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.