Susan Sontag

“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”

“To collect photographs is to collect the world.”

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

“The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”

“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.”

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”

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

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”

“My library is an archive of longings.”

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

“To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.”

“Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.”

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”

“A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.”

“Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen at once... and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you.”

“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known.”