AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.


Susan Sontag

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Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
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Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l...
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Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
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It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.
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No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
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She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT
The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For th...
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Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
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I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t...
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I'm part of a team that raises millions of dollars and raises awareness of HIV and AIDS all over...
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She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
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Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society ma...
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It not only funds our programs, it raises awareness in the community. We feel very blessed that the ...
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It?s kind of sad, but it is time to close the store. It?s very sad for both of us because it?s been ...
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accomplished what we did this quarter in large part because of our no-late-fees program, not in spit...
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Name the fears that are holding you back. It's the equivalent of flooding the boogeyman with light.
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I feel so grateful to Ann because I feel like she did it in large part for the residents.
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We're well versed in what collaboration takes. It has not been part of this process. Collaboration i...
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You don't find interesting stuff because you don't search enough, ... every book has it's own lesson...
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Who you know only gets you in the door; what you know gets you the keys to the house.
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Something did happen, and I really don't feel proud of it.
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I think it is a serious problem for Microsoft, because people start looking for alternatives. Part o...
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When we lose a loved one, whether by a broken relationship or by unexpected death, the most difficul...
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Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large ...
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You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
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Always Be Ready For Anything that Comes: Bananas, Chips, College, an Opportunity, so when it does yo...
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Boston is the cream of the crop of the marathon world. It has such history that you feel such honor ...
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Thus far in our negotiations, the government's idea of what will make the Lewiston victims whole has...
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Time determines the occurrence of possibilities and impossibilities, but God determines the time for...
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There's such great hockey in the New York area that it's baffling steps have never been taken before...
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We're the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world and here we have one of the most endangered ...
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His dad (Steve Ford) has been a very important part of our boosters, and has been a very important p...
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His dad (Steve Ford) has been a very important part of our boosters, and has been a very important p...
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I've never been a part of a film before that offers such a platform into real issues, that raise...
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It is a very beautiful feeling. I feel happy. It is simply dreamy to be part of such a team.
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Time is a teacher which in the end it kills all it's students. (Synchronicity 2015 Film)
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Her hormones slipped into their sexy underwear with a grin.
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Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
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It is what it is, it is what you make it.
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I don't know if I have a favorite color.
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It's very special having a new little girl.
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What immediately made it feel like home was all the pictures — most of them in pretty new frames. M...
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What this president has done in conducting a secretive, deceitful, highly costly war which has taken...
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The unfortunate thing is that, sometimes, we slip, but, fortunately, consciously or unconsciously, w...
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The populations are so large it's taken a couple of gathers to get down to our target numbers. We do...
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March 11, 2004, now occupies a place in the history of infamy.
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It has been a very good rivalry, but it seems to be a pretty special rivalry right now because both ...
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All love is bittersweet. Love is inexplicable; it is part poetry and part masochism. Part of love is...
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All companies use servers of various sizes. Servers represent a disproportionate amount of profit op...
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I am often asked how it is that I am able to value people to such a deep degree. Apparently, I exhib...
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The plan seems very comprehensive, and I was very impressed with it. (The plan) is headed in the rig...
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Humanism, it seems, is almost impossible in America where material progress is part of the national ...
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She parted her lips as though she were going to scold him, but, after a moment of sitting with her m...
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Vinyl is democratic, as surely as the iPod is fascist. Vinyl is representational: It has a face. Two...
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Due in large part to our advocacy efforts for Niger, it's been brought to the front pages all around...
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It seems to me very difficult to implement this legislation at a European-wide level because it woul...
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When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fai...
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I think it's been a chaotic process, very candidly, as to what has happened, because of all of the c...
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I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and s...
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For starters, that’s a rather simple principle of Time Travel right there – and according to the...
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We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empat...
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We Are All Infinite
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(All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes...
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You can't just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You ...
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I saw other people there. Old men sitting alone. Young girls with blue eye shadow and awkward jaws. ...
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That one moment when you know you are not a sad story. You are ALIVE.
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Somos quienes somos por un montón de razones.Quizás nunca conozcamos la mayoría de ellas.Pero aun...
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Ambos dijeron que tomara asiento y parecían hablar en serio, así que me senté.
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I know these will all be stories some day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We all beco...
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So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybewe'll never know most of them.
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There's nothing like the deep breathes after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore st...
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no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks, when the teacher rings the bell, drop...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I don't know the significance of this, but I find it very interesting.
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Maybe it’s sad that these are now memories. And maybe it’s not sad.
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Our island has been the source of eagles for both mainland populations and northern islands. It's po...
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A year ago, it was clear that we had taken our eye off the ball with ISVs. Our mantra since then has...
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I'm energized, determined and I look forward to being part of the community here in Dallas. I know w...
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It's very surreal. It seems like everywhere I go, people always talk about 'Indiana Jones,&#...
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I travel all the time, but when I come back to the South, I see such progress. In a real sense, a gr...
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I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I me...
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I feel privileged to be a U.N. ambassador. It gives me an opportunity to use my voice to help raise ...
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The importance of media attention from an awareness and educational standpoint has been a very good ...
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More Susan Sontag

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considere...
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The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the fin...
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating th...
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War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is,...
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Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate...
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The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of A...
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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...
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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
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The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
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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.
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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...
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. I...
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e...
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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...
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
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Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ...
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Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
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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.
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In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
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A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o...
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu...
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative...
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I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
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Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the...
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
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I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa...
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The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and...
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The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture...
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves....
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It is not the position, but the disposition.
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion o...
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Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri...
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How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel...
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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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.
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Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read...
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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