Susan Sontag

Photography—more than any other art—speaks to the human desire to acquire, to take command of the world, to exercise dominion over it.

But to Sontag the new sensibility was about precisely that ability to move between high and low, the so-called elite and popular or mass cultures of the day.

This fateful sentence is the first evidence that she would come to associate her own independence with the necessity of becoming cruel to anyone who claimed a part of her.

Susan had a fierce desire to possess literature and to be possessed by it.

“People usually say they want to become a writer to express themselves or because they have something to say. For me it was a way of being. It was like enlisting in an army of saints … I didn’t think I was expressing myself. I felt that I was becoming something, taking part in a noble activity.”