What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

- Susan Sontag

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

- Susan Sontag

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

- Susan Sontag

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

- Susan Sontag

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

- Susan Sontag

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

- Susan Sontag

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

- Susan Sontag

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

- Susan Sontag

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

- Susan Sontag

To photograph is to confer importance.

- Susan Sontag

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

- Susan Sontag

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

- Susan Sontag

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

- Susan Sontag

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

- Susan Sontag

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

- Susan Sontag

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

- Susan Sontag

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

- Susan Sontag

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

- Susan Sontag

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

- Susan Sontag

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

- Susan Sontag