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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

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
Insofar
Photographs
Shock
Photograph
Novel
Show
Shows
Something

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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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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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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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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
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The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
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A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.
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Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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