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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

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
Obliged
Crowds
Choose
Fiction
History
Truth

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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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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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The white race is the cancer of human history.
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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Courage is morally neutral.
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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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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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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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.
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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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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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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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