Susan Sontag Quotes

Most popular Susan Sontag Quotes

Cogito ergo boom. - Susan Sontag quote.
Cogito ergo boom.
— Susan Sontag

military

Art is seduction, not rape. - Susan Sontag quote.
Art is seduction, not rape.
— Susan Sontag Against Interpretation

art

Cancer is a demonic pregnancy. - Susan Sontag quote.
Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
— Susan Sontag Illness as a Metaphor

cancer

Literature usually begets literature. - Susan Sontag quote.
Literature usually begets literature.
— Susan Sontag Against Interpretation

literature

My library is an archive of longings. - Susan Sontag quote.
My library is an archive of longings.
— Susan Sontag As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980

libraries

Depression is melancholy minus its charms. - Susan Sontag quote.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
— Susan Sontag Illness as a Metaphor

depression

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

writers

False values begin with the worship of things. - Susan Sontag quote.
False values begin with the worship of things.
— Susan Sontag The Benefactor

things possessions worship

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech. - Susan Sontag quote.
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
— Susan Sontag Styles of Radical Will

silence

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. - Susan Sontag quote.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
— Susan Sontag Against Interpretation

intellect

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser. - Susan Sontag quote.
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
— Susan Sontag

self-esteem

Intelligence ... is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. - Susan Sontag quote.
Intelligence ... is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
— Susan Sontag Against Interpretation

intelligence

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. - Susan Sontag quote.
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.
— Susan Sontag Illness as a Metaphor

illness

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

ambition

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. - Susan Sontag quote.
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.
— Susan Sontag Esquire

asking questions answers

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

camera

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both. - Susan Sontag quote.
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
— Susan Sontag in The New York Times

writers

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

disasters science fiction

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style — but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated. - Susan Sontag quote.
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style — but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
— Susan Sontag

style

Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. - Susan Sontag quote.
Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
— Susan Sontag The New York Review of Books

photography

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust.  And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied. - Susan Sontag quote.
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust.  And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
— Susan Sontag On Photography

camera

There's nothing wrong with standing back and thinking.  To paraphrase several sages: "Nobody can think and hit at the same time." - Susan Sontag quote.
There's nothing wrong with standing back and thinking.  To paraphrase several sages: "Nobody can think and hit at the same time."
— Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others

thinking

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource with which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds. - Susan Sontag quote.
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource with which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
— Susan Sontag Styles of Radical Will

religion

In the final analysis, "style" is art.  And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation. - Susan Sontag quote.
In the final analysis, "style" is art.  And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
— Susan Sontag Against Interpretation

style

Sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication, through scruple, but then again it may not. - Susan Sontag quote.
Sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication, through scruple, but then again it may not.
— Susan Sontag Styles of Radical Will

sex

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. - Susan Sontag quote.
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
— Susan Sontag On Photography

camera photography

To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself.  For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response.  Nothing is more decisive. - Susan Sontag quote.
To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself.  For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response.  Nothing is more decisive.
— Susan Sontag Against Interpretation

taste

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. - Susan Sontag quote.
Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture.
— Susan Sontag Against Interpretation

cinema

Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. - Susan Sontag quote.
Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers.
— Susan Sontag At the Same Time

literature

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? - Susan Sontag quote.
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours?
— Susan Sontag

books sympathy

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 quote.
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 The New York Review of Books

photography

Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. - Susan Sontag quote.
Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal.
— Susan Sontag At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches

television

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 quote.
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 Illness as a Metaphor

psychology spiritual

Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing—which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power. - Susan Sontag quote.
Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing—which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.
— Susan Sontag The New York Review of Books

photography

I really believe in history, and that's something people don't believe in anymore. I know that what we do and think is a historical creation. I have very few beliefs, but this is certainly a real belief: that most everything we think of as natural is historical and has roots — specifically in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the so-called Romantic revolutionary period — and were essentially still dealing with expectations and feelings that were formulated at that time, like ideas about happiness, individuality, radical social change, and pleasure. We were given a vocabulary that came into existence at a particular historical moment. - Susan Sontag quote.
I really believe in history, and that's something people don't believe in anymore. I know that what we do and think is a historical creation. I have very few beliefs, but this is certainly a real belief: that most everything we think of as natural is historical and has roots — specifically in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the so-called Romantic revolutionary period — and were essentially still dealing with expectations and feelings that were formulated at that time, like ideas about happiness, individuality, radical social change, and pleasure. We were given a vocabulary that came into existence at a particular historical moment.
— Susan Sontag

history

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

intelligence taste

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style.  It is love of the exaggerated.