Susan Sontag

"Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom."

"I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence."

"I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent."

"Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."

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

"Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art."

"All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt."

"Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager."

"My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am."

"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."

"Writing is a mysterious activity."

"The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both."

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

"That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life."