Susan Sontag famous quotes

Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
-- Susan Sontag

#Successful #Self #Feelings

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

#Beauty #Citizens #Redemption

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
-- Susan Sontag

#Beauty #Beautiful #Women

Sanity is a cozy lie.
-- Susan Sontag

#Depression #Women #Lying

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
-- Susan Sontag

#Exercise #Literature #Ability

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

#Cancer #Government #Civilization

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
-- Susan Sontag

#New Year #Kindness #Prayer

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
-- Susan Sontag

#Dream #Memories #Book

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
-- Susan Sontag

#Love #Mysterious #Relation

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
-- Susan Sontag

#Art #Real #Design

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
-- Susan Sontag

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Kissing

It is not the position, but the disposition.
-- Susan Sontag

#Inspirational #Motivational #Attitude

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
-- Susan Sontag

#Self #People #Transformation

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
-- Susan Sontag

#Artist #Hands #Eras

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
-- Susan Sontag

#Moments #Photograph #Mortality

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
-- Susan Sontag

#Interesting #History #Answers

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

#Art #Passion #Perfect

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
-- Susan Sontag

#Creativity #Men #Boredom

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.
-- Susan Sontag

#Feelings

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
-- Susan Sontag

#Strong #Feelings #Creation

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
-- Susan Sontag

#Book #Reading #Bigs

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
-- Susan Sontag

#Intelligent #People #Care

Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
-- Susan Sontag

#Patient #Exploring #Conscience

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
-- Susan Sontag

#Healthy #Becoming #Alive

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
-- Susan Sontag

#Thinking #Sage #Paraphrase

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
-- Susan Sontag

#Art #Worry #People

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

#Nature #Gun #People

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
-- Susan Sontag

#Art #Science #Fiction

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
-- Susan Sontag

#Envy #People #Attention

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
-- Susan Sontag

#Work #Ambition #Doe

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.
-- Susan Sontag

#Compassion #Bored #Cynical

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
-- Susan Sontag

#Art #Levels #Photograph

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.
-- Susan Sontag

#Cities #Empathy #Joy

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
-- Susan Sontag

#Wish #Becoming #Recognition

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
-- Susan Sontag

#Life Is #Photograph

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.
-- Susan Sontag

#Sleep #Writing #Want

But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures
-- Susan Sontag

#Nostalgic

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.
-- Susan Sontag

#Inspiration #Writing #Guilt

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
-- Susan Sontag

#Waiting #Solitude #Able

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
-- Susan Sontag

#Hands #Way #Moral

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
-- Susan Sontag

#Artist #Example #Despise

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
-- Susan Sontag

#Thinking #World #Pay

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
-- Susan Sontag

#Writing #Ideas

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
-- Susan Sontag

#Film

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

#Museums #Grandparent #Generations

Art is a form of consciousness.
-- Susan Sontag

#Art #Consciousness #Form

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
-- Susan Sontag

#Writing #Tasks #Slavery

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
-- Susan Sontag

#Sex #Mind #Resources

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
-- Susan Sontag

#Pain #Taken #People

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
-- Susan Sontag

#Photography #Mean #World

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
-- Susan Sontag

#Writing #Literature #Audience

The only interesting ideas are heresies
-- Susan Sontag

#Ideas #Interesting #Heresy

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

#Loss #Culture #Modern Life

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
-- Susan Sontag

#Literature #Muse #Modern

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
-- Susan Sontag

#Art #Writing #Feelings

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

#Health #Sick #Citizens

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.
-- Susan Sontag

#Sex #Self #Secret

Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
-- Susan Sontag

#Mean #Being In Love #Ruins

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.
-- Susan Sontag

#Want

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are
-- Susan Sontag

#Reality #Drawing #Doe

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
-- Susan Sontag

#Women #Reality #People

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

#Beauty #Time #Past

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
-- Susan Sontag

#Inspirational #Change #Community

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
-- Susan Sontag

#Funny #Book #Science

What we need is to use what we have.
-- Susan Sontag

#Use #Needs #Action

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
-- Susan Sontag

#Inspirational #Photography #Today

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
-- Susan Sontag

#Art #Revenge #Women

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
-- Susan Sontag

#Inspirational #Funny #Travel

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
-- Susan Sontag

#Photography #Cousin #Albums

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
-- Susan Sontag

#Photography #Book #Order

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
-- Susan Sontag

#Writing #Agony #Passionate

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.
-- Susan Sontag

#Real #Political #Disease

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
-- Susan Sontag

#Art #Contemplation #Great Art

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
-- Susan Sontag

#Art #Needs #Hermeneutics

To photograph is to confer importance.
-- Susan Sontag

#Photography #Photograph #Importance

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
-- Susan Sontag

#Dream #Follow Your Dreams

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
-- Susan Sontag

#Photography #Pain #Photographer

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
-- Susan Sontag

#Photography #Past #America

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
-- Susan Sontag

#Art #Writing #Destiny

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
-- Susan Sontag

#Writing #Doors #Pieces

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.
-- Susan Sontag

#Writing #Alive #Firsts

The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
-- Susan Sontag

#World #Pay #Attention

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.
-- Susan Sontag

#Moving #Memorable #Looks

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
-- Susan Sontag

#Reality #Citizens #Pollution

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
-- Susan Sontag

#Writing #Talking #Touching

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
-- Susan Sontag

#Liberty #Expansion #Possibility

My library is an archive of longings.
-- Susan Sontag

#Inspirational #Book #Reading

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
-- Susan Sontag

#Tired #Persons

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
-- Susan Sontag

#Gun #People #Cameras

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
-- Susan Sontag

#Different #Needs #Steel

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
-- Susan Sontag

#Matter #Population #Moved

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.
-- Susan Sontag

#Reality #Ideas #Way

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
-- Susan Sontag

#Inspirational #Encouraging #Travel

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
-- Susan Sontag

#Silence #Speech #Form

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
-- Susan Sontag

#Taken #Writing #Body

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
-- Susan Sontag

#Truth #Lying #Opposites

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

#Order #Space

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
-- Susan Sontag

#Kind #Wanted

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.
-- Susan Sontag

#Courage #Dare

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
-- Susan Sontag

#Intelligent #Ideas #Intelligence