Susan Sontag

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets.

Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.

Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

Taste has no system and no proofs.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.

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

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

The only interesting ideas are heresies

It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.

To the militant, identity is everything.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

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