Susan Sontag

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of \'spiritual\' feelings and \'critical\' discontent, is insanity.

Literature usually begets literature.

Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.

The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

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