Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anime, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly.

— Susan Sontag

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

— Susan Sontag

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

— Susan Sontag

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.

— Susan Sontag

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

— Susan Sontag

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w

— Susan Sontag

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

— Susan Sontag

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

— Susan Sontag