Susan Sontag

“The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.”

“A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.”

“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.”

“It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”

“Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.”

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”

“Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.”

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”

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

“It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.”

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

“One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.”

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

“Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.”

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.”

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

“Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.”

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

“If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.”

“There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”