Sontag Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling. — Susan Sontag

All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to. — 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

Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum. — Susan Sontag

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world. — Susan Sontag

Reassurances are multiplying in the United States and Western Europe that "the general population" is safe. But "the general population" may be as much a code phrase for whites as it is for heterosexuals. Everyone knows that blacks are getting AIDS in disproportionate numbers, as there is a disproportionate number of blacks in the armed forces and a vastly disproportionate number in prisons. — 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

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. — Susan Sontag

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

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

Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I. — Susan Sontag

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

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 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

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination. — Susan Sontag

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. — Susan Sontag

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

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

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. — 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

Rules of taste enforce structures of power. — Susan Sontag

It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys. — Susan Sontag

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

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

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more. — 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

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

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

I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent. — Susan Sontag

To travel is to shop. — Susan Sontag

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences. — Susan Sontag

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

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded. — Susan Sontag

Passion paralyzes good taste. — 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

Today everything exists to end in a photograph. — Susan Sontag

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

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

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. — Susan Sontag

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. — Roland Barthes

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness. — 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

Desire has no history... — Susan Sontag

My ignorance is not charming. — Susan Sontag

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)- a material vestigate of its subject in a way that no painting can be ... Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross. — 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

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. — Susan Sontag

A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, — Susan Sontag

That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life. — 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

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else. — 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

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

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes. — Susan Sontag

Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Family.' — Caitlin Moran

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

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

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much. — Susan Sontag

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

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

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one. — 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

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

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

Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. 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. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P — 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

To collect photographs is to collect the world. — Susan Sontag

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

Work is experienced as discipline--the background of which is ascesis--even though it also gives pleasure. One is allowed to become "depersonalized" in work, to forget the self (to lose contact with its most intimate feelings and needs)--indeed all that is necessary if one is to give oneself fully to the work. — Susan Sontag

Life is a movie; death is a photograph. — Susan Sontag

I believe in the soul ... the small of a woman's back, the hanging curveball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. — Kevin Costner

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

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

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

Something is neutral only with respect to something else - like an intention or an expectation. — Susan Sontag

For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. — 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

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

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

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. — Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman. — Edward Abbey

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

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

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

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

I love to read the way people love to watch television. — Susan Sontag