Susan Sontag Quotes

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

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

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

You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books. ~ 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

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony. ~ 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

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

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

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

In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, "Today, everything exists to end in a photograph." Today, does everything exist to end online? ~ Sherry Turkle

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. ~ 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

War has been the norm and peace the exception ~ Susan Sontag

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

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

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

It is not the position, but the disposition. ~ 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

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in. ~ Susan Sontag

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings. ~ 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

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

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

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- ~ Susan Sontag

My loyalty to the past - my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most. ~ Susan Sontag

It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power. ~ Susan Sontag

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature.
Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated.
I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts.
I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true. ~ Susan Sontag

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

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. ~ Susan Sontag

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. ~ Susan Sontag

Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one. ~ 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

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

Communism is fascism with a human face. ~ Susan Sontag

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one
or both. Usually both. ~ 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

As long as art is understood and valued as an "absolute" activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses. So far as the best art defines itself by essentially "priestly" aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear - and then sent away. ~ Susan Sontag

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. ~ 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

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive. ~ Susan Sontag

To travel is to shop. ~ Susan Sontag

I am sick of having opinions. I am sick of talking. ~ Susan Sontag

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying. ~ 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

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

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. ~ 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

Kindness, kindness, kindness.

I want to make a New year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage. ~ 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

It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless. ~ Susan Sontag

The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. ~ 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

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

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail. ~ 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

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather. ~ Susan Sontag

A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing. ~ Susan Sontag

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. ~ Susan Sontag

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. ~ Susan Sontag

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. ~ 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

Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself. ~ Susan Sontag

Sanity is a cozy lie. ~ 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

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

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese. ~ 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

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. ~ Susan Sontag

The early Romantic sought superiority by desiring, and by desiring to desire, more intensely than others do. ~ 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

Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished. ~ Susan Sontag

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. ~ Susan Sontag

...and one might suspect too that A. Cretan said : "To long to read!"

"My library is an archive of longings."
― Susan Sontag"

"There is a space between man's [sic] imagination and man's [sic] attainment that may only be traversed by his longing."
― Khalil Gibran [sick] ~ A. Cretan

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

When the right person does the wrong thing, it's the right thing. ~ Susan Sontag

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism. ~ 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

With genius, as with beauty
all, well almost all, is forgiven. ~ Susan Sontag

Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the ... jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you. ~ Susan Sontag

It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech. ~ Susan Sontag

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. ~ Susan Sontag

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2. ~ Susan Sontag

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism. ~ Susan Sontag

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech. ~ Susan Sontag

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions. ~ 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

All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. ~ Susan Sontag

There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching. ~ Sontag, Susan

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

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. ~ Susan Sontag

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ~ 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

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

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

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind. ~ 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

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

I am only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. ~ Susan Sontag