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
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
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
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
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
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
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Books
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Change
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
Sanity is a cozy lie
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Sanity
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Sex
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: Criticism, Critics
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Ambition
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
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: People, Beauty
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
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
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
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
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
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
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Books, Literature
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Realization, Awareness, Acceptance
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
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
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Dying, Death
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Injury
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Existence
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
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Intellectuals, Intelligence
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Questioning
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease—because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Advice, Disease
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
Topics: Photography
On Photography “Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Photography
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Potential
Morality is a form of acting and not a particular repertoire of choices.
—Susan Sontag
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
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Photography
Taste has no system and no proofs.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: Style, Taste
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
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth… the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.
—Susan Sontag
Topics: America
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