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.
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Science Fiction
Taste has no system and no proofs.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Taste, Style
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Realization, Awareness, Acceptance
Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness—pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one’s consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Sex
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, Excess
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, Bores
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Advice, Disease
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Books
All forms of consensus about “great” books and “perennial” problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of “what is already known.” Those great books don’t only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Politics
Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man’s destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Men
In 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, conformable.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Criticism, Critics
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were… in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Quotations
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.
—Susan Sontag
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
In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
—Susan Sontag
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices.
—Susan Sontag
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Ambition
When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Photography
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
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
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
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Photography
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one’s existence as a full human being and one’s existence as a sexual being—while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. Normally we don’t experience, at least don’t want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Pornography
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
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Dreams
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Truth, Balance
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
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Beauty, People
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Problems
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