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

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Oldest
Disaster
Films
Subjects
Fiction
Science
Art
Film

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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
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To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: Oh, this is where it comes from! I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
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...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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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.
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