I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
Susan Sontag
Related I like a challenge. I need to feel passionate about something. If I'm not passionate about it, I... TIESTO I don't want to do stories that don't have a heart. I'm just not going to be satisfied w... AARON HUEY I don't want to make the same mistakes of being swept along with things, taking on jobs that I... KELLY BROOK I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t... SALLY MANN I don't want to be viewed as a womaniser or whatever. I don't like going crazy crazy, I like... HARRY STYLES I'm very old-fashioned - I don't operate with an agenda. If you're a biographer, you wan... RICHARD NORTON SMITH The honest truth is no, I don't feel like I arrived. I don't feel like I'm worthy. My pu... ADAM GREEN Nobody likes to fail. I want to succeed in everything I do, which isn't much. But the things tha... EMINEM I'm depressed when I don't get to do music. Having to go back to doing something I don't... KIP MOORE I don't like being too serious. I'm the type of person that, if the mike isn't in the ri... SAVION GLOVER I hold onto the Scripture that says, 'Be anxious for nothing, but in all things give thanks.'... KIM FIELDS It's that I'm 39. I feel hot and sexy, actually... I feel it inside myself. I don't feel... KYRA SEDGWICK I'm passionate about fantasy movies. I'm passionate about comic book movies. I'm passion... JOSH KEATON I don't want to be Tom Cruise. I'm not after some movie blockbuster career. That's not t... RANDY HARRISON I'm decrepit but I don't want to give up, and I love my work. HELEN THOMAS I feel like what I owe my audience is what I'm most passionate about. BRUCE HORNSBY Condemnatory conservatism isn't anything I'm interested in. DAVID BRUDNOY I certainly have gotten caught up in the music business at various times in my life, mostly because ... FRANK BLACK I don't know if I'm so much fueled by trying to one-up myself so much as passionate about co... DEAN KARNAZES If I don't have the drive and determination to wake up every day and train with young, hungry fi... ROBBIE LAWLER I don't want to be competing in a sport where I feel that I'm here not on my talent and my h... OSCAR PISTORIUS I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process... JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN I don't like my whole life dragged out. I don't want anyone to know about me, because I don&... LILLY PULITZER I feel a lot healthier when I'm having sex. Physically. I feel all these jitters when I wake up ... ALYSSA MILANO I'm passionate about learning. I'm passionate about life. TOM CRUISE I don't care what I look like. I must be comfortable. Some of my friends have plastic surgery an... MIRIAM MARGOLYES I am passionate about music - and people think because I go to places where I can enjoy music I have... RONALDINHO I don't sleep much. It takes me a long time to fall asleep. I'm a bit of an insomniac but, w... ENRIQUE IGLESIAS I'm interested in all kinds of art. I draw and paint and don't know how to play the banjo, b... ELLAR COLTRANE I'm a big baseball fan, and I feel proprietary about the Dodgers. I'm not the owner. I'm... CARLTON CUSE Man, 2013, I would expect an album from B.o.B and a Rock EP as well. My Rock EP is like... I take pr... B.O.B I don't believe in careers. I believe in work. I'm not interested in some 'big picture t... DEBRA WINGER I'm very proud of being a woman, and as a woman, I don't even like the word 'feminism... EVANGELINE LILLY I'm an instinctive actor. I just see the part and play it. I'm more interested in what isn... PHILIP GLENISTER Comedy should be a source of positivity. I don't want to bully people, and I don't want peop... BO BURNHAM I'm a father. It isn't just my life any more. I don't want my kid finding bottles in the... BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG I don't want a life without my mom in it, but I'm not someone who curls up in the fetal posi... KHLOE KARDASHIAN I've always been passionate about acting. I haven't been passionate about being famous. DAVID ALPAY But quite honestly I can't help being a passionate football supporter. If that's my sin, I... DELIA SMITH I just want to make music, I don't want people to talk about me. All I've ever wanted to do ... ADELE When I write, I wear earplugs. I don't want to be self-conscious. I don't want to be thinkin... MIRANDA JULY People are always saying that Hollywood messes up kids. I'm like, 'No, families mess up kids... TORI SPELLING I don't want to think about what I'm doing in 20 years. All I want is I want to be happy, an... SAM SMITH I'd rather be thought as an international actress rather than a French one. Because I don't ... EVA GREEN I don't want to be someone sitting in my rocking chair at the end saying, 'Well, I passed.... MICHAEL IGNATIEFF I'm a passionate individual, and sometimes when I have strong feelings about a subject, I feel t... MEGAN FOX I don't think anyone wakes up and says, 'I want my life to suck today.' ROBERT HERJAVEC I don't want to be entertained. I don't want visuals or musicals. I don't want a vacatio... ANNE GRAHAM LOTZ I honestly can't describe what goes on in my head when I'm out there. People who don't w... EDDIE GUERRERO I don't want to know movie directors. I don't want to be close to them. I don't want to ... PATRICIA HIGHSMITH I like it, but it's yellow, and I'm like, I didn't want yellow for my engagement ring. PARIS HILTON I do not have bad days. I don't wake up in the morning and think that I'm going to get AIDS.... MAGIC JOHNSON I'm not on Twitter or Facebook. I've never been interested in being on any of them. I don... HANNAH WARE I know I need to watch myself because I don't want anyone to think I'm snobby or stuck up. I... AUSTIN O'BRIEN I don't feel typecast almost at all, and it could just be because I'm insensitive, but I dou... GRACE PARK Guys wake up at your place and they expect breakfast. They don't eat bagels and M&M's in... ELAYNE BOOSLER I don't want to make an 'Animal House.' I'm not interested in making 'Ghost Bust... DAVID L. WOLPER I don't want to be too strict, because I think kids can get rebellious, but I want to raise my d... HOLLY MADISON I used to tell my graduate students at Stanford, 'Don't worry about what job you have to pic... SEBASTIAN THRUN I'm a big believer in persistence, don't be greedy and, above all, work hard. It's what ... CAPRICE BOURRET I've always believed in working hard, and I'm grateful that people seem to connect with the ... RAINA TELGEMEIER I don't read much when I'm working. When I'm finished work, I don't want a thing to ... PAULINE GEDGE I don't want to pretend to be a prophet or a saint. I'm very conscious of my limitations. I ... NORMAN FINKELSTEIN I love my work, and I feel fortunate to be doing a job I love, but it isn't the centre of my lif... NATASHA LITTLE My legacy doesn't matter. It isn't important that I be remembered. It's important that w... JAMES DOBSON I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. ... MUHAMMAD ALI I don't want my learning curve to be stunted by just all of a sudden doing work all the time and... PAUL DANO If you like being battered, the work of Savion Glover - one-time child prodigy - should be up your a... ROBERT GOTTLIEB I don't care what you say about me anymore! I don't care what you write about me anymore. I ... GERRY COONEY I don't care about the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim isn't involved in anything that I am inter... CHUCK CLOSE I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. It's funny - people ask me that, and I don... MACKENZIE ROSMAN I think that creative work, music in particular, is a conveyor of inner emotional life. I don't ... KYP MALONE I'm like, bursting. I should be working. I don't want to take a break. It's funny, on se... KRISTEN STEWART I'm 80 years old, and I don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up. LARRY KING It's not getting any better, is it? I don't want my 19-year-old boy going into the army. I l... BURT BACHARACH I'm more interested in my life than I am in my career. I don't want to not work. I do enjoy ... RACHEL TICOTIN I don't have muscle tone. I'm just flab. I'm not a daredevil. I don't like pain, I d... CHARLENE TILTON Fashion isn't interesting when it comes from an uninspired place. It's like voodoo; we don... CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN I think of myself as a positive agnostic. I don't know, therefore I'm open. I don't know... GRACE SLICK I don't feel unlucky in love anymore, and it's not all emo. It's a scary place to be in ... JENNY LEWIS I'm not a perfect person who doesn't mess up, eat bad, not work out - I do all those things.... JESSICA BIEL Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing... DAVID HOCKNEY Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it and I'm afraid of people... LUCILLE BALL I don't want to do something that's watered down. I don't want to take what I'm know... BILLY EICHNER My focus is my art, and that's what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do ... BEYONCE KNOWLES I'm very passionate about what I do. KEVYN AUCOIN All my life, men have told me I wasn't pretty enough - even the men I was dating. And I'd be... LIL' KIM I'm not saying that what the radio plays isn't good. My issue is with what they don't pl... DJ JAZZY JEFF I'm quite contrary. If people agree on something, I tend to gravitate the other way by my nature... ANDY SERKIS I'm interested in doing movies I wouldn't normally be interested in doing. ERIC STOLTZ I don't want to be satisfied with where I'm at or happy about what I've done. I want to ... PATRICK KANE Most of my guitars have been instruments that look cool. I'm not picky. I never think, 'Oh, ... JAMES HETFIELD I don't feel like I've hit my stride. So I wonder what the moment will be when I get to be w... ANNA TORV I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if... ROBERT FISK With all the highs and lows I've had in my life, I wouldn't change anything. So no, I don... DAVID COVERDALE What's overwhelmingly clear is 'Havana' didn't work for people, but why it didn'... SYDNEY POLLACK I don't want to be Babe Ruth. He was a great ballplayer. I'm not trying to replace him. The ... ROGER MARIS I like work/life separation, not work/life balance. What I mean by that is, if I'm on, I want to... TIMOTHY FERRISS I'm such a homebody. I don't party. I don't drink. That may be because I got it out all ... OLIVIA THIRLBY What's worked for me is not quitting and being passionate about what I do and not giving up - an... MARC JACOBS
More Susan Sontag
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considere... 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 ... 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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 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