850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera’s eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay.

I am thinking – talking – in images. I don’t know how to write them down. Every feeling is physical.

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart.

There are some elements in life – above all, sexual pleasure – about which it isn’t necessary to have a position.

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life – its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness – conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.

To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response.

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding – at a distance, through the medium of photography – other people’s pain.