850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.

The most refined form of sexual attractiveness – as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure – consists in going against the grain of one’s sex.

I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don’t consider it a moral virtue.

It’s a pleasure to share one’s memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn’t know it at the time. We know it now. Because it’s in the past; because we have survived.

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.

So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.