850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.

I’ve become passive. I don’t invent, I don’t yearn. I manage, I cope.

I don’t consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example – for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have...

I guess I think I’m writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I’ll be doing something that’s worth their time. I’d be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ’too much.

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary – are, in the largest sense, political.