FastSaying

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.


Susan Sontag

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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Based on the statistics, most of the charges saying that obesity caused various diseases or that obe...
ERIC OLIVER She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT It's considered a shameful crime. The court process is not easy on them. Their past gets dragged up.
CHAR BLODGETT Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
CAITLIN MORAN [Most writers' view of the New West is] either phony - obsessed with the same tired mythology - or i...
WALTER KIRN Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
SUSAN SONTAG Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l...
SUSAN SONTAG Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
SUSAN SONTAG All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memor...
SUSAN SONTAG It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.
SUSAN SONTAG With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - li...
SUSAN SONTAG What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-re...
SUSAN SONTAG No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
SUSAN SONTAG Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami...
CAITLIN MORAN I don't want to write soft, easy fiction; I want to write fiction that challenges.
BRIAN A. MCBRIDE I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t...
SALLY MANN The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan ...
BETH HENLEY [About Susan Sontag] Her quest for meaning, for significance was endless. She described life more as...
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real h...
KATE MOSSE Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society ma...
NAOMI WOLF For the most part kids learn about sexually transmitted diseases when they are getting diagnosed wit...
JULIE DOWNS There were 284 deaths from West Nile virus last year, (but) 30,000 deaths from pneumonia and influen...
DANIEL BLUMENTHAL The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It...
RANDY PAUSCH There are a lot of unknowns about these diseases, and CWD is probably the most enigmatic.
GLENN TELLING It is not history, theology or mythology that interest me. It is the fact that history, theology or ...
ASHWIN SANGHI Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day.
CRAIG GROESCHEL If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
URSULA K. LE GUIN Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, w...
JORGE LUIS BORGES His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING I'm sure that many of the deaths that have occurred (after the hurricane) have resulted from people ...
DAVID SATCHER I'm sure that many of the deaths that have occurred (after the hurricane) have resulted from people ...
DAVID SATCHER Don't believe everything you read or hear, remember a large part of our world is made up of fiction!...
VICTORIA ADDINO Contrary to popular mythology, the best and most durable relationships are based not on vulnerabilit...
MARIELLA FROSTRUP If you are embarrassed about your sex, it must mean that you feel there is something demeaning or di...
PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR The cool thing for me is, I go to a lot of conventions - a lot of science fiction conventions like C...
J. AUGUST RICHARDS Luckless is the country in which the symbols of procreation are the objects of shame, while the agen...
SAVINIEN CYRANO DE BERGERAC Most of them are considered Gilded Age presidents, from Reconstruction to 1900. But you know, it's n...
BOB LEITH The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes...
RICHARD K. MORGAN Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite cha...
ALDOUS HUXLEY A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about r...
CHAIM POTOK America's most dangerous diseases have developed an immunity to politics. We suffer not from a failu...
CAL THOMAS In the real world, 90% of the money spent on medical research is focused on conditions that are resp...
PETER SINGER It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and...
VIRGINIA WOOLF but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.
JANE AUSTEN Like it or not... that's my story and I can't do that or that each action by itself is a limitation.
DEYTH BANGER One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance t...
GILLIAN CROSS Those who are born of parents broken with old age, or of such as are not yet ripe or are too young, ...
THOMAS WILLIS In Europe, people in the arts are considered part of the intelligentsia; they are considered part of...
RON SILVER We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we m...
JOHN CONNOLLY There is no such thing as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the world whatsoever. It is just the impurit...
DADA BHAGWAN I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed t...
J. G. BALLARD Diseases desperate grownBy desperate appliances are relieved,Or not at all.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction.
DIANA GABALDON America's most dangerous diseases have developed an immunity to politics. We suffer not from a f...
CAL THOMAS Anyways, that very same night there was a fight in the casino on B Deck. Some of the passengers got ...
CHRISTINA ENGELA Most of us cluster somewhere in the middle of most statistical distributions. But there are lots of ...
VIRGINIA POSTREL I'm only interested in science fiction that's used as a literary device, a shortcut into som...
SHANE CARRUTH I am interested in most mythology. Celtic or Christian no more than anything else.
TANITH LEE There's something about the superheroes and the idea behind their relationship with humans, whet...
CLARK GREGG I know a little about Greek mythology. It's not that far away from the Nordic mythology.
MADS MIKKELSEN II know a little about Greek mythology. It's not that far away from the Nordic mythology.
MADS MIKKELSEN Diseases, desperate grown, By desperate appliance are reliev'd, Or not at all.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Diseases desperate grown By desparate appliance are relieved, Or not at all.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Soft drinks are a big part of it but they are just part of it.
DAVE DECECCO Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren'...
JOANNE HARRIS Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C. There is something really amazing about you.. Your unique ideas and thoughts that you bring to this ...
RACHEL HAMILTON Of the primary emotions, fear is the one that bears most directly on survival. Children show fear. A...
SEBASTIAN JUNGER It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writ...
NAVEEN ANDREWS It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than...
NEIL GAIMAN You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
HENRY JAMES Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases
WILLIAM SHENSTONE The only deadly disease I have seen that is causing great harm and massacre latently yet the world h...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH The proudest thing is that there were no deaths or injuries.
PETER DREIER 2. Overcommitment and time pressure are the greatest destroyers of marriages. It takes time to devel...
JAMES C. DOBSON There is indeed a legend of a yeti, or abominable snowman, that is considered the protector of the H...
KATHY ROGERS Of those who die from avoidable, poverty-related causes, nearly 10 million, according to UNICEF, are...
PETER SINGER Of those who die from avoidable, poverty-related causes, nearly 10 million, according to UNICEF, are...
PETER SINGER The circulatory system of man and the vertebrate animals can be considered as made up of a small num...
AUGUST KROGH Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...
SUSAN SONTAG My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not lik...
TOM WOLFE This is the latest in a series of deaths across the nation in boot camps. We need not wait or stall ...
ADORA NWEZE This is the latest in a series of deaths across the nation in boot camps. We need not wait or stall ...
ADORA OBI NWEZE We cannot vulgarize the deaths. We can't keep talking about winning or being competitive while there...
PAULO AUTUORI The single easiest and best thing most of us can do to prevent cancer or its recurrence is to eat ri...
JENNIFER REILLY The terrifying fear of a crash had triggered the fight-or-flight response in the child, making him b...
PAWAN MISHRA This is troubling because there are about 35 million contact-lens wearers in the USA and, of those, ...
DR. ROBERT CYKIERT I have mixed feelings about how fast things are changing as a result of technology. There's no d...
AMANDA CREW [W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fana...
JARED DIAMOND A beetle will chase after an opening of light, while a cockroach will scatter at a crack of it. How ...
SUZY KASSEM 'Star Wars' is mythology. It's like Greek mythology or Shakespeare. It's the story o...
MICHAEL FRANTI I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense...
DAVID O. RUSSELL This is either for trauma or accident type patients or type of chronic diseases like diabetes or hea...
ANTON KRUCKY For the most part, I don't care about what everyone else is doing, or what is popular.
NAMIE AMURO Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mytholog...
JOSEPH CAMPBELL There is no simple answer for what it means to be Canadian. There are a thousand answers that come t...
ALEXI ZENTNER

More Susan Sontag

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write...
SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precio...
SUSAN SONTAG It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the fin...
SUSAN SONTAG Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating th...
SUSAN SONTAG War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is,...
SUSAN SONTAG Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...
SUSAN SONTAG Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate...
SUSAN SONTAG American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chro...
SUSAN SONTAG The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of A...
SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own expe...
SUSAN SONTAG In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art ...
SUSAN SONTAG Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the ra...
SUSAN SONTAG Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading towa...
SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
SUSAN SONTAG The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
SUSAN SONTAG Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The questio...
SUSAN SONTAG A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

[Speech upon being awa...
SUSAN SONTAG Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
SUSAN SONTAG Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more ...
SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
SUSAN SONTAG Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. I...
SUSAN SONTAG Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e...
SUSAN SONTAG The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
SUSAN SONTAG The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less inter...
SUSAN SONTAG In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents ...
SUSAN SONTAG The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontroll...
SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
SUSAN SONTAG Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be ...
SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ...
SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
SUSAN SONTAG Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
SUSAN SONTAG In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o...
SUSAN SONTAG Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...
SUSAN SONTAG What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu...
SUSAN SONTAG Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative...
SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the...
SUSAN SONTAG Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men...
SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,...
SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
SUSAN SONTAG We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting...
SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,...
SUSAN SONTAG AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ...
SUSAN SONTAG AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder...
SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa...
SUSAN SONTAG Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us...
SUSAN SONTAG Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n...
SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ...
SUSAN SONTAG What we need is to use what we have.
SUSAN SONTAG Sanity is a cozy lie.
SUSAN SONTAG It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,...
SUSAN SONTAG The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and...
SUSAN SONTAG Taste has no system and no proofs.
SUSAN SONTAG The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture...
SUSAN SONTAG One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves....
SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o...
SUSAN SONTAG I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kind...
SUSAN SONTAG Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability....
SUSAN SONTAG As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people t...
SUSAN SONTAG Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
SUSAN SONTAG The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
SUSAN SONTAG The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of...
SUSAN SONTAG I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
SUSAN SONTAG The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
SUSAN SONTAG Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists...
SUSAN SONTAG Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
SUSAN SONTAG What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine w...
SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less intere...
SUSAN SONTAG Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the s...
SUSAN SONTAG For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ...
SUSAN SONTAG The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured m...
SUSAN SONTAG To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
SUSAN SONTAG The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wis...
SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
SUSAN SONTAG Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
SUSAN SONTAG Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past...
SUSAN SONTAG Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, th...
SUSAN SONTAG My library is an archive of longings.
SUSAN SONTAG We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the cal...
SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper...
SUSAN SONTAG We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if n...
SUSAN SONTAG Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...
SUSAN SONTAG Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after yea...
SUSAN SONTAG I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams
SUSAN SONTAG I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really h...
SUSAN SONTAG Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p...
SUSAN SONTAG Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on va...
SUSAN SONTAG Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an ind...
SUSAN SONTAG Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to w...
SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational term...
SUSAN SONTAG The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in...
SUSAN SONTAG Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p...
SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remai...
SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a pass...
SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exagge...
SUSAN SONTAG 'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love o...
SUSAN SONTAG It is not the position, but the disposition.
SUSAN SONTAG The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions
SUSAN SONTAG Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by...
SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Pre...
SUSAN SONTAG Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
SUSAN SONTAG Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l...
SUSAN SONTAG Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
SUSAN SONTAG All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memor...
SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion o...
SUSAN SONTAG American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed ...
SUSAN SONTAG Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
SUSAN SONTAG All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or t...
SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
SUSAN SONTAG Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citiz...
SUSAN SONTAG Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [...
SUSAN SONTAG People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens...
SUSAN SONTAG So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympath...
SUSAN SONTAG All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If ...
SUSAN SONTAG To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which doe...
SUSAN SONTAG Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs ar...
SUSAN SONTAG Desire has no history...
SUSAN SONTAG Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism...
SUSAN SONTAG Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--on...
SUSAN SONTAG Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics...
SUSAN SONTAG Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri...
SUSAN SONTAG How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!
SUSAN SONTAG As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel...
SUSAN SONTAG Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ...
SUSAN SONTAG I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
SUSAN SONTAG Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c...
SUSAN SONTAG [O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.
SUSAN SONTAG Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
SUSAN SONTAG Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo...
SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
SUSAN SONTAG Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extensi...
SUSAN SONTAG Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
SUSAN SONTAG Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read...
SUSAN SONTAG All photographs are memento mori.
SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper...
SUSAN SONTAG The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual dis...
SUSAN SONTAG Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize,
SUSAN SONTAG Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
SUSAN SONTAG This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of b...
SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow t...
SUSAN SONTAG A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is ...
SUSAN SONTAG The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged,...
SUSAN SONTAG The Way We Live Now
SUSAN SONTAG Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that...
SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of styli...
SUSAN SONTAG He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
SUSAN SONTAG With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
SUSAN SONTAG Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "vi...
SUSAN SONTAG Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to det...
SUSAN SONTAG The aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by ne...
SUSAN SONTAG It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking...
SUSAN SONTAG But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo...
SUSAN SONTAG Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled re...
SUSAN SONTAG It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other pe...
SUSAN SONTAG One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The na...
SUSAN SONTAG The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations...
SUSAN SONTAG [Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A ...
SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
SUSAN SONTAG The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste...
SUSAN SONTAG Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature
SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual ...
SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
SUSAN SONTAG My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything,'
SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them
SUSAN SONTAG The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of...
SUSAN SONTAG Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
SUSAN SONTAG A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. ...
SUSAN SONTAG