Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Susan Sontag

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Susan Sontag

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

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

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
Susan Sontag

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Susan Sontag

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
Susan Sontag

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
Susan Sontag

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
Susan Sontag

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
Susan Sontag

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

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Susan Sontag

To photograph is to confer importance.
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

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
Susan Sontag

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
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

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