850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism.

All memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones – those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books.

Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists.

Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can’t force it.

We are told we must choose – the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?

A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent – more important than any words.