Susan Sontag Quotes

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag

"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is."
The Benefactor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963, ISBN 0-312-42012-9), ch. 1 (p. 1)

Quotes from On Photography - ISBN 0385267061

"So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful."
"The Heroism of Vision" (p. 85)

"The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown."
"Photographic Evangels" (p. 147)

"Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist upon their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up — a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing — that "it seemed like a movie." This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was. While many people in non-industrialized countries still feel apprehensive when being photographed, divining it to be some kind of trespass, an act of disrespect, a sublimated looting of the personality or the culture, people in industrialized countries seek to have their photographs taken — feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs."
"The Image-World" (p. 161)