Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Sex
In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
—Susan Sontag
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Mental Illness, Attention
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Photography
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 becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Potential
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
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Ambition
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
Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
—Susan Sontag
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Nature
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
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, Tourism
In the final analysis, “style” is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Style
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Photography
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 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: Taste, Style
It’s a pleasure to share one’s memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe—though we didn’t know it at the time. We know it now because it’s in the past, because we have survived.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Memory, Past
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
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: Style, Taste
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
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Society
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 only 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
Topics: Health
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Questioning
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
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
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
Topics: Photography
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Disease, Advice
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: Death, Dying
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
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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