Susan Sontag

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

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

The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

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

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.