Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was an American essayist, fiction writer, and literary and cultural critic. Celebrated for her essays and reviews on avant-garde art, popular culture, and leftist politics, Sontag also authored three novels, wrote and directed four feature-length films, composed abundant short stories, and wrote several plays.
Born in New York City, Sontag studied at California-Berkley, Chicago, Harvard. She established her reputation as a radical intellectual and cultural critic with her essays Against Interpretation (1966) in which she argued that the most fitting response to creative works is emotive and sensory, not intellectual.
Sontag’s other notable works include On Photography (1976,) about the social and cultural roles of photography, and Illness as Metaphor (1979,) a collection of essays motivated by her experiences as a cancer patient.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Style, Taste
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Truth
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Travel, Photography
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Proverbs
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 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
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.
—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
Topics: Life
In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
—Susan Sontag
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: Boredom
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art—like physical beauty in a person—is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Morality, Morals
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Photography
Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices.
—Susan Sontag
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