Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Sex, Religion
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Existence
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
Topics: Race, Racism
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Nature
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Dying, Death
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
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
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
Topics: Fame
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
Topics: The Past
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
Topics: Things, Little Things
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Intellectuals, Intelligence
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Exaggeration
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
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom
Taste has no system and no proofs.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Taste, Style
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Ambition
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. 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
Topics: Criticism
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
Topics: Awareness, AIDS
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Bores, Boredom
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Books
War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view “realistically;” that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent—war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: War
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Potential
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
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
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Photography
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Critics, Criticism
Volume depends precisely on the writer’s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Writers
The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Taste, Style
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
Topics: Pessimism
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Sex
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Criticism
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Problems
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Muriel Rukeyser American Poet
- Sheryl Sandberg American Executive, Author
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
- Gertrude Stein American Writer
- Judy Blume American Author
- Emma Goldman American Anarchist
- Rita Mae Brown American Writer, Feminist
- George Steiner American Culture Critic
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