Susan Sontag Quotes on World (9 Quotes)

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world.

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.

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

Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That we are here, prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening, while elsewhere in the world, right now in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio....To be a travelerand novelists are often travelersis to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned home.

The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were. . . in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage.

the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.