Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. Susan Sontag
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. Susan Sontag
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. Susan Sontag
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. Susan Sontag
The writer is either a practising recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both. Susan Sontag
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. Susan Sontag
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. 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. Susan Sontag
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals. Susan Sontag
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. Susan Sontag
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares. Susan Sontag
Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. Susan Sontag
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject…. [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual. Susan Sontag
The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. Susan Sontag
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens – and real diseases are useful material. Susan Sontag
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. Susan Sontag