Susan Sontag Quotes & Sayings

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it. — 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

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

Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. — Susan Sontag

I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets. — 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

Photographers are always imposing — 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

In the 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, comfortable. — Susan Sontag

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. — 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

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

Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness. — Susan Sontag

The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past. — 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

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do
but who is that 'we'?
and nothing 'they' can do either
and who are 'they'
then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic. — Susan Sontag

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. — 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

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. — Susan Sontag

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

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it. — 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

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. — Susan Sontag

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. — 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

I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think. — Susan Sontag

Taste has no system and no proofs. — Susan Sontag

Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even ... Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity. — Susan Sontag

I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it. — Susan Sontag

That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action. — Susan Sontag

The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction. — Susan Sontag

With more people, there are more voices to tune out. — 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

I don' t want to learn anything from the failure of this love. — Susan Sontag

Cancer is a demonic pregnancy. — Susan Sontag

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. — Susan Sontag

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly. — Susan Sontag

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize. — Susan Sontag

Time evaporate, money is always needed, comforts found where they were not expected and excitement dug up in barren ground. — Susan Sontag

Being in love (l'amour fou) a pathological variant of loving. Being in love = addiction, obsession, exclusion of others, insatiable demand for presence, paralysis of other interests and activities. A disease of love, a fever (therefore exalting). One "falls" in love. But this is one disease which, if one must have it, is better to have often rather than infrequently. It's less mad to fall in love often (less inaccurate for there are many wonderful people in the world) than only two or three times in one's life. Or maybe it's better always to be in love with several people at any given time. — Susan Sontag

To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant in time and geography, of a beloved person. Such a death bears a peculiar imprint of doubt. To be told one day that someone has gone off to the other side of the world, and with whom you expect momentarily to be reunited, has actually been dead for many months, during which you have been going on with your life, unaware of this subtraction that has taken place, makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal - which is why we bear to take in so much of it. — Susan Sontag

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex. — 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

The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate. — 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 furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. — 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

Depression is melancholy minus its charms. — 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 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

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

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

Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything. — 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

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

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

It is passivity that dulls feeling. — 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

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

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

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

The reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera — Susan Sontag

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought — Susan Sontag

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. — 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

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

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones
those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. — Susan Sontag

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. — 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

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

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD. — 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

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

There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. — Susan Sontag

Art is seduction, not rape. — Susan Sontag

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

If one could amputate part of one's consciousness ... — Susan Sontag

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

The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local. — 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 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

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

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love. — Susan Sontag

Sanity is a cozy lie. — 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

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. — 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