Susan Sontag

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

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

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

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.

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

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

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

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

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

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

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

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.

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

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

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.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

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

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

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.