Susan Sontag Quotes

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.

There's no changing the way people are. No one changes, everyone knows that.

He looked into the hole, and like any hole it said, Jump.

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

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.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.

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

Wherever people feel safe ( ... ) they will be indifferent.

I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create - or guarantee - existence. Hence, my compulsion to make "lists." The things (Beethoven's music, movies, business firms) won't exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.
Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

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.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

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.

The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer - delicately you added: all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.)

[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.

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.

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.

People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.

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.

A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. Not only because it can always be added to, but because it is already too much. The collector's need is precisely for excess, for surfeit, for profusion. It's too much - and it's just enough for me. ... A collection is always more than is necessary.

The process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

Can I love someone ... and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

Interpretation must itself be
evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts,
interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping
the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly,
stifling.

The longing to touch / be touched. I feel gratitude when I touch someone - as well as affection, etc. The person has allowed me proof that I have a body - and that there are bodies in the world.

The appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

We do not find among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and the Orientals the same value placed on love because we do not find there the same positive value placed on suffering. Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one's ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, by one's ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium. In contrast, the sensibility we have inherited identifies spirituality and seriousness with turbulence, suffering, passion. For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain. Thus it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering - more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.

The most precious thing is vitality – not in any sinister Lawrentian sense, but just the will + energy + appetite to do what one wants to do + not to be 'sunk' by disappointments. Aristotle is right: happiness is not to be aimed at; it is a by-product of activity aimed at.

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato's Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!

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.

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.

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.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.

I remember expressing amazement (+ feeling superior) when Harriet said once in Paris that she didn`t know whether or not she had been in love with someone. I couldn`t understand what she was talking about. I said that had never happened to me. Of course not. Since for me being in love is deciding: I`m in love + sticking to it, I`m always well informed.
-Reborn

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.

There does come a point when you have to acknowledge you're no longer postponing something and you really have made a choice.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

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.

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

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

Most of Arbus's work lies within the Warhol aesthetic, that is, defines itself in relation to the twin poles of boringness and freakishness; but it doesn't have the Warhol style. Arbus had neither Warhol's narcissism and genius for publicity nor the self-protective blandness with which he insulates himself from the freaky nor his sentimentality. It is unlikey that Warhol, who comes from a working-class family, ever felt any ambivalence toward success which afflicted the children of the Jewish upper middle classes in the 1960s. To someone raised as a Catholic, like Warhol (and virtually everyone in his gang), a fascination with evil comes much more genuinely than it does to someone from a Jewish background. Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent--and certainly more pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus's material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966)...For Arbus, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic: a boy marching in a pro-war parade and a Levittown housewife were as alien as a dwarf or a transvestite; lower-middle-class suburbia was as remote as Times Square, lunatic asylums, and gay bars. Arbus's work expressed her turn against what was public (as she experienced it), conventional, safe, reassuring--and boring--in favor of what was private, hidden, ugly, dangerous, and fascinating. These contrasts, now, seem almost quaint. What is

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.

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.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if we could not forget ourselves, at least some of the time? Who would we be if we could not learn? Forgive? Become something other than we are?

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, 'Alice, Alice, what is the answer?' Her companion replied, 'There is no answer.' Gertrude Stein continued, 'Well, then, what is the question?' and fell back dead.

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.

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.

(Part of the self-definition of Europe and the neo-European countries is that it, the First World, is where major calamities are history-making, transformative, while in poor, African or Asian countries they are part of a cycle, and therefore something like an aspect of nature.) Nor has AIDS become so publicized because, as some have suggested, in rich countries the illness first afflicted a group of people who were all men, almost all white, many of them educated, articulate, and knowledgeable about how to lobby and organize for public attention and resources devoted to the disease. 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

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always "over there," with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace. And "terrorist" is a more flexible word than "communist." It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless
since there will always be some terrorism.

What do I enjoy? Music, being in love, children, sleeping, meat.

[On marriage:] It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.

It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive ( ... ). But whatever you took home from the movies was only part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours - which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.

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?

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

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.

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and an object of surveillance (for rulers).

I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex.
- A Woman of No Importance
45. Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

I was thinking, Ursula said . . . that the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show 'still.' You can just show him being live.

War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.

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

Taste has no system and no proofs.

Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.

Ideas disturb the levelness of life

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

Everyone else not real-very distant, small figures. I would have to swim a thousand miles to reach the margin of the relationship, on the other side of which might lie other people, and it was too far, I was too tired.
The almost infinitely extending network of that relationship; its dense weave That's what held me-

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.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.

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.

Beware of anything that you hear yourself saying often.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

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

No one extraordinary appears to be entirely contemporary. People who are contemporary don't appear at all: they are invisible.

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.

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.

Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

Did I feel all that? So much? As sounds decays into inadudibility, euphoria decays into indifference, and that is always unexpected, the way exalted feelings are weakened, undone by time.

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois ...

To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States-a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history-is exempt. That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful belief in American exceptionalism.

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.

Like other diseases that arouse feelings of shame, AIDS is often a secret, but not from the patient. A cancer diagnosis was frequently concealed from patients by their families; an AIDS diagnosis is at least as often concealed from their families by patients.

A six-week trip to China in 1973 convinced me - if I needed convincing - that the autonomy of the aesthetic is something to be protected, and cherished, as indispensable nourishment to intelligence. But a decade-long residence in the 1960s, with its inexorable conversion of moral and political radicalisms into "style," has convinced me of the perils of over- generalizing the aesthetic view of the world.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won't come through.

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.)

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.

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.