Top 100 Sontag Quotes
#1. Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out ... are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.
Naomi Wolf
#2. In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, "Today, everything exists to end in a photograph." Today, does everything exist to end online?
Sherry Turkle
#3. I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to the emotional core of me.
Sally Mann
#4. Susan, Susan -- Poetry: aviation! Prose: infantry. [to Susan Sontag]
Joseph Brodsky
#5. Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan Sontag.
Caitlin Moran
#6. Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.
Edward Abbey
#7. I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris. It was rainy. It was all wrong. And I was thinking, 'God, she loved life so much.'
Marina Abramovic
#8. Observing that we have waged wars on poverty and drugs as well as cancer, Susan Sontag writes, "Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in
Eula Biss
#9. Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.
Edward Abbey
#10. I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others.
Edmund White
#11. Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Family.'
Caitlin Moran
#12. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
#14. As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Susan Sontag
#15. Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.
Susan Sontag
#16. Nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.
Susan Sontag
#17. Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.
Susan Sontag
#18. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag
#20. Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.
Susan Sontag
#21. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.
Susan Sontag
#22. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.
Susan Sontag
#23. I vulgarize my feelings by speaking of them too readily to others.
Susan Sontag
#24. The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.
Susan Sontag
#25. Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag
#26. The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
Susan Sontag
#27. War has been the norm and peace the exception
Susan Sontag
#28. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
#29. With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.
Susan Sontag
#30. Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
#31. Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
#32. Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.
Susan Sontag
#33. [T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement
not incitement.
Susan Sontag
#34. Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
Susan Sontag
#35. I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.
Susan Sontag
#36. 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
#37. A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
Susan Sontag
#38. All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
Susan Sontag
#39. It was not a question of knowledge ... but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention.
Susan Sontag
#40. There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
Susan Sontag
#42. If one could amputate part of one's consciousness ...
Susan Sontag
#43. I am sick of having opinions. I am sick of talking.
Susan Sontag
#44. Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
Susan Sontag
#45. It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
Susan Sontag
#46. 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
#47. What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
Susan Sontag
#48. I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.
Susan Sontag
#49. There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.
Susan Sontag
#50. Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag
#51. 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
#52. My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
Susan Sontag
#53. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
Susan Sontag
#54. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Susan Sontag
#55. Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself - it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting.
Susan Sontag
#56. If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
Susan Sontag
#57. 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
#58. It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
Susan Sontag
#59. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.
Susan Sontag
#61. Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease.
Susan Sontag
#62. Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.
Susan Sontag
#63. One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another's ambitiousness.
Susan Sontag
#64. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power.
Susan Sontag
#65. The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
Susan Sontag
#66. The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
Susan Sontag
#67. The appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
Susan Sontag
#68. An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
Susan Sontag
#69. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.
Susan Sontag
#70. For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer.
Susan Sontag
#71. We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.
Susan Sontag
#72. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
Susan Sontag
#73. Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.
Susan Sontag
#74. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
Susan Sontag
#75. Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
Susan Sontag
#76. What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?
Sontag, Susan
#77. The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.
Susan Sontag
#78. Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
Susan Sontag
#79. Can I love someone ... and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
Susan Sontag
#80. What do I enjoy? Music, being in love, children, sleeping, meat.
Susan Sontag
#81. It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.
Susan Sontag
#82. Shouting has never made me understand anything.
Susan Sontag
#83. 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. There would only be what is.
Susan Sontag
#84. What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such - of what lies beyond the human and the made - and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.
Susan Sontag
#85. Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
Susan Sontag
#86. The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.
Susan Sontag
#87. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response.
Susan Sontag
#88. His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.
Susan Sontag
#89. A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.
Susan Sontag
#90. One of art photography's most vigorous enterprises
[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate
but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
#91. Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.
Susan Sontag
#92. The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
Susan Sontag
#93. Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
Susan Sontag
#94. As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.
Susan Sontag
#95. Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
Susan Sontag
#96. 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
#97. In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
Susan Sontag
#98. I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
Susan Sontag
#99. 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
#100. Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Susan Sontag
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