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

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

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
Susan Sontag

It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
Susan Sontag

It is not the position, but the disposition.
Susan Sontag

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

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Susan Sontag

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Susan Sontag

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
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

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

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
Susan Sontag

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Susan Sontag

Sanity is a cozy lie.
Susan Sontag

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Susan Sontag

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
Susan Sontag

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
Susan Sontag