850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.

A great writer has all 4 – but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph – only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again – and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. With him I have neither, neither privacy or passion. Neither the heightening of self which is won by privacy and loneliness, nor the splendid heroic beautiful loss of self that accompanies passion.

The problem isn’t that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs.

I vulgarize my feelings by speaking of them too readily to others.