Susan Sontag

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

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

It is not the position, but the disposition.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

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

Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.