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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. -- Susan Sontag
Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more. -- Susan Sontag
I'm in love. Don't ask me how it's possible. It's just not in character; my nightmare-ridden, stubborn, melancholy character. And yet, it's
happened. -- Susan Sontag
I vulgarize my feelings by speaking of them too readily to others. -- Susan Sontag
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. -- Susan Sontag
The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded. -- Susan Sontag
Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. -- Susan Sontag
What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work. -- Susan Sontag
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. -- Susan Sontag
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. -- Susan Sontag
Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire -- Susan Sontag
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality ... One can't possess reality, one can possess images
one can't possess the present but one can possess the past. -- Susan Sontag
Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. -- Susan Sontag
To be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies. -- Susan Sontag
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims. -- Susan Sontag
If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space. -- Susan Sontag
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. -- Susan Sontag
Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others. -- Susan Sontag
[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement
not incitement. -- Susan Sontag
Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov. -- Susan Sontag
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world. -- Susan Sontag
This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased. -- Susan Sontag
Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. -- Susan Sontag
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003] -- Susan Sontag
The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois ... -- Susan Sontag
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. -- Susan Sontag
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois. -- Susan Sontag
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. -- Susan Sontag
Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle. -- Susan Sontag
Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don't have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up - up, up. And ... down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I'm on my feet again. See, I'm starting to roll it up again. Don't try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock. -- Susan Sontag
One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not. -- Susan Sontag
Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina. -- Susan Sontag
Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. -- Susan Sontag
In fact, words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture's meaning. -- Susan Sontag
I feel inauthentic at a party ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies. -- Susan Sontag
A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol - is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry. -- Susan Sontag
Only thing that counts are ideas. Behind ideas are [moral] principles. Either one is serious or one is not. Must be prepared to make sacrifices. I'm not a liberal. -- Susan Sontag
It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices. -- Susan Sontag
Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all. -- Susan Sontag
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. -- Susan Sontag
The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence. -- Susan Sontag
I don' t want to learn anything from the failure of this love. -- Susan Sontag
Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love. -- Susan Sontag
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart. -- Susan Sontag
Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism. -- Susan Sontag
Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised. -- Susan Sontag
Writing is a mysterious activity. -- Susan Sontag
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. -- Susan Sontag
Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust. -- Susan Sontag
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility ... Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods. -- Susan Sontag
Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures -- Susan Sontag
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. -- Susan Sontag
Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex. -- Susan Sontag
Can I love someone ... and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings. -- Susan Sontag
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more. -- Susan Sontag
You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write. -- Susan Sontag
I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't. -- Susan Sontag
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. -- Susan Sontag
I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive. -- Susan Sontag
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. -- Susan Sontag
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching. -- Susan Sontag
With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence. -- Susan Sontag
There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. -- Susan Sontag
A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2. -- Susan Sontag
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated. -- Susan Sontag
A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears. -- Susan Sontag
One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful. -- Susan Sontag
To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. -- Susan Sontag
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. -- Susan Sontag
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one
or both. Usually both. -- Susan Sontag
Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility); a dismantling of the artist's competence, his responsible sense of vocation - and therefore as an aggression against them. Modern -- Susan Sontag
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable. -- Susan Sontag
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. -- Susan Sontag
Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic. -- Susan Sontag
One of art photography's most vigorous enterprises
[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate
but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve. -- Susan Sontag
The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful -- Susan Sontag
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. -- Susan Sontag
Ideas disturb the levelness of life -- Susan Sontag
Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies. -- Susan Sontag
The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo. -- Susan Sontag
Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again. -- Susan Sontag
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is. -- Susan Sontag
In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all. -- Susan Sontag
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else. -- Susan Sontag
It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys. -- Susan Sontag
What do I enjoy? Music, being in love, children, sleeping, meat. -- Susan Sontag
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. -- Susan Sontag
The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art. -- Susan Sontag
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form. -- Susan Sontag
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin. -- Susan Sontag
Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes. -- Susan Sontag
All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation. -- Susan Sontag
How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion! -- Susan Sontag
Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love. -- Susan Sontag
The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. -- Susan Sontag
The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. -- Susan Sontag
One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. -- Susan Sontag
The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex. -- Susan Sontag
With genius, as with beauty
all, well almost all, is forgiven. -- Susan Sontag
The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game -- Susan Sontag
Time evaporate, money is always needed, comforts found where they were not expected and excitement dug up in barren ground. -- Susan Sontag
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood. -- Susan Sontag
He looked into the hole, and like any hole it said, Jump. -- Susan Sontag
Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.) -- Susan Sontag
Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism. -- Susan Sontag
Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal. -- Susan Sontag
War has been the norm and peace the exception -- Susan Sontag
Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrangement. -- Susan Sontag
Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music. -- Susan Sontag
Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas. -- Susan Sontag
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. -- Susan Sontag
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons. -- Susan Sontag
The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer. -- Susan Sontag
Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing. -- Susan Sontag
Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test. -- Susan Sontag
I love to read the way people love to watch television. -- Susan Sontag
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all. -- Susan Sontag
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares. -- Susan Sontag
All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to. -- Susan Sontag
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind. -- Susan Sontag
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall. -- Susan Sontag
One can never ask anyone to change a feeling. -- Susan Sontag
There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. -- Susan Sontag
It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along ... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. -- Susan Sontag
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. -- Susan Sontag
Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing. -- Susan Sontag
Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself. -- Susan Sontag
In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. -- Susan Sontag
Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease. -- Susan Sontag
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity. -- Susan Sontag
Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon - one that's as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology. -- Susan Sontag
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. -- Susan Sontag
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment. -- Susan Sontag
No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. -- Susan Sontag
Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption. -- Susan Sontag
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material. -- Susan Sontag
Passion paralyzes good taste. -- Susan Sontag
If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well. -- Susan Sontag
The beauty of modern cities consists in a sense of their power, cruelty, impersonality, massiveness, + variety (as in New York or London) seen against the architectural vestiges of a beautiful past. -- Susan Sontag
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied. -- Susan Sontag
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. -- Susan Sontag
The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a creator but a destroyer - a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity, and empty phrases. -- Susan Sontag
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature. -- Susan Sontag
One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience. -- Susan Sontag
The Cavaliere has retired to his study and reads, trying not to think about what is going on around him
one of the principal uses of a book. -- Susan Sontag
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication -- Susan Sontag
Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently. -- Susan Sontag
A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short. -- Susan Sontag
What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy. -- Susan Sontag
Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny ... it is also her vulnerability. -- Susan Sontag
God, living is enormous! -- Susan Sontag
Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism. -- Susan Sontag
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. -- Susan Sontag
Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable. -- Susan Sontag
What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such - of what lies beyond the human and the made - and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all. -- Susan Sontag
Desire has no history... -- 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. -- Susan Sontag
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease. -- Susan Sontag
The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates. -- Susan Sontag
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. -- Susan Sontag
When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in. -- Susan Sontag
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. -- Susan Sontag
Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air. -- Susan Sontag
What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed. -- Susan Sontag
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. -- Susan Sontag
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -- Susan Sontag
Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much. -- Susan Sontag
Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. -- Susan Sontag
It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's. -- Susan Sontag
A crisis of self-respect. What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work. I'm being wasted by self-pity and self-contempt. -- Susan Sontag
I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don't like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I am tired. -- Susan Sontag
The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute -- Susan Sontag
We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history. -- Susan Sontag
The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste. -- Susan Sontag
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste. -- Susan Sontag
I am scared, numbed from the marital wars - that deadly, deadening combat which is the opposite, the antithesis of the sharp painful struggles of lovers. Lovers fight with knives and whips, husbands and wives poisoned marshmallows, sleeping pills, and wet blankets. -- Susan Sontag
One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another's ambitiousness. -- Susan Sontag
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease
because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses. -- Susan Sontag
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. -- Susan Sontag
Two weeks after the flight of the government from Naples, the French moved an army of six thousand soldiers into the city, and by late January a cabal of enlightened aristocrats and professors had engendered a monstrosity that called itself the Parthenopean or Vesuvian Republic. Most -- Susan Sontag
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. -- Susan Sontag
My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language. -- Susan Sontag
The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses. -- Susan Sontag
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. -- Susan Sontag
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories. -- Susan Sontag
I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry. -- Susan Sontag
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. -- Susan Sontag
Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished. -- Susan Sontag
Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.) -- Susan Sontag
Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view. -- Susan Sontag
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head. -- Susan Sontag
The appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. -- Susan Sontag
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses. -- Susan Sontag
For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. -- Susan Sontag
10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction. -- Susan Sontag
Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide. -- Susan Sontag
Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes. -- Susan Sontag
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society. -- Susan Sontag
Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself. -- Susan Sontag
The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. -- Susan Sontag
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. -- Susan Sontag
To travel is to shop. -- Susan Sontag
One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith ... -- Susan Sontag
To the militant, identity is everything. -- Susan Sontag
The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it. -- Susan Sontag
I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think. -- Susan Sontag
Love dies because its birth was an error. -- Susan Sontag
Part of the modern ideology of love is to assume that love and sex always go together, and probably the greatest problem for human beings is that they just don't -- Susan Sontag
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. -- Susan Sontag
In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political. -- Susan Sontag
An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious. -- Susan Sontag
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it. -- Susan Sontag
All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. -- Susan Sontag
Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty. -- Susan Sontag
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community. -- Susan Sontag
America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent. -- Susan Sontag
The really important thing is not to reject anything. -- Susan Sontag
(The Queen had real power, and a woman in power, feared as virile, is often accused of being a slut. -- Susan Sontag
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. -- Susan Sontag
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them. -- Susan Sontag
One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much. -- Susan Sontag
In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said ... of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences. -- Susan Sontag
The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it aloneits ideologies and inventionswhich eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. -- Susan Sontag
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories. -- Susan Sontag
I like to feel dumb. That's how I know there's more in the world than me. -- Susan Sontag
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum. -- Susan Sontag
The fact that illness is associated with the poor
who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst
reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place. -- Susan Sontag
Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own. -- Susan Sontag
[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing. -- Susan Sontag
American energy ... is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism -- Susan Sontag
Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others. -- Susan Sontag
To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune. -- Susan Sontag
In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain. -- Susan Sontag
To collect photographs is to collect the world. -- Susan Sontag
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. -- Susan Sontag
The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all. -- Susan Sontag
Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. -- Susan Sontag
The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias. -- Susan Sontag
In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs. -- Susan Sontag
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. -- Susan Sontag
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. -- Susan Sontag
Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.) -- Susan Sontag
The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man. -- Susan Sontag
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. -- Susan Sontag
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. -- Susan Sontag
A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. -- Susan Sontag
Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. -- Susan Sontag
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable. -- Susan Sontag
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. -- Susan Sontag
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. -- Susan Sontag
To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. -- Susan Sontag
Today everything exists to end in a photograph. -- Susan Sontag
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world. -- Susan Sontag
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.
Photographs are. -- Susan Sontag
You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it. -- Susan Sontag
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. -- Susan Sontag
When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese. -- Susan Sontag
My library is an archive of longings. -- Susan Sontag
Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure. -- Susan Sontag
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility. -- Susan Sontag
Liberal intellectualstend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping thatthose in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the establishment. -- Susan Sontag
Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it. -- Susan Sontag
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed. -- Susan Sontag
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life
its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness
conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. -- Susan Sontag
It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making. -- Susan Sontag
To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. -- Susan Sontag
What we need is to use what we have. -- Susan Sontag
I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love. -- Susan Sontag
A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, -- Susan Sontag
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize. -- Susan Sontag
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same. -- Susan Sontag
I am only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. -- Susan Sontag
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. -- Susan Sontag
War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather. -- Susan Sontag
A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture -- Susan Sontag
Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer. -- Susan Sontag
Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations. -- Susan Sontag
Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I. -- Susan Sontag
Photographers are always imposing -- Susan Sontag
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation. -- Susan Sontag
I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path. -- Susan Sontag
Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards. -- Susan Sontag
I want to save my soul, that timid wind. -- Susan Sontag
The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious
that is, a disease not understood
in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured. -- Susan Sontag
His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him. -- Susan Sontag
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic. -- Susan Sontag
a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, -- Susan Sontag
Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. -- Susan Sontag
The work of art itself is ... a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched. -- Susan Sontag
In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. -- Susan Sontag
To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation. 4 -- Susan Sontag
Women may be vain, but when a man is vain, it is beyond believing, for a man is willing to die for his vanity. -- Susan Sontag
What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship - -- Susan Sontag
It is not the position, but the disposition. -- Susan Sontag
I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets. -- Susan Sontag
It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid. -- Susan Sontag
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past. -- Susan Sontag
But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all. -- Susan Sontag
Art is a form of consciousness. -- Susan Sontag
When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures. -- Susan Sontag
I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD. -- Susan Sontag
Philosophy is an art form - art of thought or thought as art -- Susan Sontag
In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one. -- Susan Sontag
Whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars. -- Susan Sontag
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life. -- Susan Sontag
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived. -- Susan Sontag
Writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed. -- Susan Sontag
The function of writing is to explode one's subject - transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations). -- Susan Sontag
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. -- Susan Sontag
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. -- Susan Sontag
I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations. -- Susan Sontag
It was not a question of knowledge ... but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention. -- Susan Sontag
Art is seduction, not rape. -- Susan Sontag
Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person. -- Susan Sontag
Wherever people feel safe ( ... ) they will be indifferent. -- Susan Sontag
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. -- Susan Sontag
False values begin with the worship of things. -- Susan Sontag
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. -- 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. -- Susan Sontag
Shouting has never made me understand anything. -- Susan Sontag
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. -- Susan Sontag
The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall. -- Susan Sontag
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. -- Susan Sontag
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas. -- Susan Sontag
It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power. -- Susan Sontag
It is passivity that dulls feeling. -- Susan Sontag
All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears. -- Susan Sontag
I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all -- Susan Sontag
And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy. -- Susan Sontag
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. -- Susan Sontag
As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything. -- Susan Sontag
Nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously. -- Susan Sontag
There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position. -- Susan Sontag
Literature usually begets literature. -- Susan Sontag
Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness. -- Susan Sontag
Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself - it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting. -- Susan Sontag
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech. -- Susan Sontag
I am sick of having opinions. I am sick of talking. -- Susan Sontag
If one could amputate part of one's consciousness ... -- Susan Sontag
There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. -- Susan Sontag
The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions. -- Susan Sontag
All struggle, all resistance is
must be
concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here. -- Susan Sontag
In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity. -- Susan Sontag
Walking onto his terrace those first months to see in the distance the well-behaved mountain sitting under the sun might provoke a reverie about the calm that follows catastrophe. -- Susan Sontag
Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum. -- Susan Sontag
Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous -- Susan Sontag
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster. -- Susan Sontag
Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. -- Susan Sontag
Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody. -- Susan Sontag
The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. -- Susan Sontag
The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local. -- Susan Sontag
Being self-conscious. Treating one's self as an other. Supervising oneself. -- Susan Sontag
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. -- Susan Sontag
The "Art Nouveau" appeal of smoking: manufacture your own pneuma, spirit. "I'm alive." "I'm decorative. -- Susan Sontag
When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. -- Susan Sontag
Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it. -- Susan Sontag
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning. -- Susan Sontag
How boring just to be a body. -- Susan Sontag
Opinions are like some kind of crust that grows on top of things and you want to kind of peel them off. -- Susan Sontag
Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy. -- Susan Sontag
I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony. -- Susan Sontag
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip. -- Susan Sontag
There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things. -- Susan Sontag
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. -- Susan Sontag
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting. -- Susan Sontag
Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed. -- Susan Sontag
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject ... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual. -- Susan Sontag
There does come a point when you have to acknowledge you're no longer postponing something and you really have made a choice. -- Susan Sontag
Something is neutral only with respect to something else - like an intention or an expectation. -- Susan Sontag
The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. -- Susan Sontag
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success. -- Susan Sontag
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them ... -- Susan Sontag
Try not to live in a linguistic slum. -- Susan Sontag
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones. -- Susan Sontag
Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not. -- Susan Sontag
Life is a movie; death is a photograph. -- Susan Sontag
To camp is a mode of seduction ... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing. -- Susan Sontag
Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'. -- Susan Sontag
The reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera -- Susan Sontag
Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation. -- Susan Sontag
My ignorance is not charming. -- Susan Sontag
The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention. -- Susan Sontag
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone. -- Susan Sontag
In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings. -- Susan Sontag
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. -- Susan Sontag
I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue. -- Susan Sontag
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter. -- Susan Sontag
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art -- Susan Sontag
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals. -- Susan Sontag
Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence. -- Susan Sontag
Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won't come through. -- Susan Sontag
A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way. -- Susan Sontag
That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life. -- Susan Sontag
Most of my reading is rereading. -- Susan Sontag
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive. -- Susan Sontag
To photograph is to confer importance. -- Susan Sontag
Somewhere, some place inside myself, I am detached. I have always been detached (in part). Always. -- Susan Sontag
Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. -- Susan Sontag
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work. -- Susan Sontag
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. -- Susan Sontag
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up -- Susan Sontag
[On marriage:] It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. -- Susan Sontag
The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism. -- Susan Sontag
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. -- Susan Sontag
To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master. -- Susan Sontag
I love to eat, even though it is easy for me not to eat (when no one feeds me, when there is no food around). -- Susan Sontag
What I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it. -- Susan Sontag
Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms. -- Susan Sontag
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading. -- Susan Sontag
Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave. -- Susan Sontag
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense. -- Susan Sontag
She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies. -- Susan Sontag
To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance. -- Susan Sontag
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. -- Susan Sontag
Every collector is potentially (if not actually) a thief. -- Susan Sontag
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. -- Susan Sontag
When the right person does the wrong thing, it's the right thing. -- Susan Sontag
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. -- Susan Sontag
A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing. -- Susan Sontag
Communism is fascism with a human face. -- Susan Sontag
The problem isn't that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs. -- Susan Sontag
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. -- Susan Sontag
The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences. -- Susan Sontag
One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. -- Susan Sontag
A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words. -- Susan Sontag
Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more. -- Susan Sontag
The place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience. -- Susan Sontag
In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. -- Susan Sontag
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter -- Susan Sontag
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. -- Susan Sontag
Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are. -- Susan Sontag
The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism. -- Susan Sontag
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought -- Susan Sontag
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it. -- Susan Sontag
Image of an image of an image ... But to record all the dips and upswings, in a sense falsifies them, and I start deluding myself and thinking all this is, or might be, real. Enough to play the game, or try to play it. A mistake to tally up the score. -- Susan Sontag
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail. -- Susan Sontag
Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology ... -- Susan Sontag
Rules of taste enforce structures of power. -- Susan Sontag
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. -- Susan Sontag
Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. -- Susan Sontag
All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. -- Susan Sontag
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness. -- Susan Sontag
The only interesting ideas are heresies -- Susan Sontag
None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. -- Susan Sontag
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. -- Susan Sontag
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness. -- Susan Sontag
Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. -- Susan Sontag
Perversity is the muse of modern literature. -- Susan Sontag
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production. -- Susan Sontag
Taste has no system and no proofs. -- Susan Sontag
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. -- Susan Sontag
The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants. -- Susan Sontag
The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony. -- Susan Sontag
I've become passive. I don't invent, I don't yearn. I manage, I cope. -- Susan Sontag
Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea. -- Susan Sontag
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. -- Susan Sontag
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. -- Susan Sontag
Few ever see what is not already inside their heads. -- Susan Sontag
Sanity is a cozy lie. -- Susan Sontag
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. -- Susan Sontag
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. -- Susan Sontag
My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn't justify my homosexuality. But it would give me - I feel - a license. -- Susan Sontag
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up. -- Susan Sontag
A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness. -- Susan Sontag
It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake. -- Susan Sontag
With more people, there are more voices to tune out. -- Susan Sontag
My loyalty to the past - my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most. -- Susan Sontag
The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still. -- Susan Sontag
Courage is morally neutral. -- Susan Sontag
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. -- Susan Sontag
The process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself. -- Susan Sontag
There's no changing the way people are. No one changes, everyone knows that. -- Susan Sontag
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to! -- Susan Sontag
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment. -- Susan Sontag
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt ... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed. -- Susan Sontag
Cancer is a demonic pregnancy. -- Susan Sontag
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. -- Susan Sontag
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. -- Susan Sontag
Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are -- Susan Sontag
I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers. -- Susan Sontag
To look at something which is "empty" is still to be looking, still to be seeing something - if only the ghosts of one's own expectations. -- Susan Sontag
Each generation has to reinvent spirituality. -- Susan Sontag
Depression is melancholy minus its charms. -- Susan Sontag
People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term. -- Susan Sontag
The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate. -- Susan Sontag
I don't care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces 'intelligence. -- Susan Sontag
The desire for reassurance. And, equally, to be reassured. (The itch to ask whether I'm still loved; and the itch to say, I love you, half-fearing that the other has forgotten, since the last time I said it.) -- Susan Sontag
Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything. -- Susan Sontag
The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence. -- Susan Sontag
Beware of anything that you hear yourself saying often. -- Susan Sontag
Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once ... and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you. -- Susan Sontag
Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not "Apocalypse Now" but "Apocalypse From Now On. -- Susan Sontag
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. -- Susan Sontag
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible ... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing. -- Susan Sontag
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying. -- Susan Sontag
We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? -- Susan Sontag
Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. -- Susan Sontag
Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious. -- Susan Sontag
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. -- Susan Sontag
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. -- Susan Sontag
