In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
Susan Sontag
Related
She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t...
SALLY MANN Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami...
CAITLIN MORAN She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
CAITLIN MORAN Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix.
DEYTH BANGER When carrying the burden of problems and stress that life seems to endlessly hurtle towards us. We g...
GARY F EVANS... To have hope in an age where hope is very scarce and hurt, jealousy and pain are more prominent is a...
GARY F EVANS... Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society ma...
NAOMI WOLF Power frees us from the chains of conformity.
ADAM GRANT 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 [About Susan Sontag] Her quest for meaning, for significance was endless. She described life more as...
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT It started somewhere from there.
DEYTH BANGER The scientific method gives us
information by testing and repeating observable things so that we
can...
LEWIS N. ROE One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life. That word is love.
SOPHOCLES The role of the
Christian is to let other people know what Jesus has done, not to
think of themselve...
LEWIS N. ROE Naturalistic atheism debunks itself. It
has no power to explain even some
of the most basic principl...
LEWIS N. ROE It's important to understand that if
someone calls themselves a Christian, it does not automatically...
LEWIS N. ROE In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jigg...
TIM O'BRIEN It really frees you up from having to have someone there to help.
GARY PEARSON You have to have a secret... There is a hidden movie in all the best films. The secret is in every f...
SAM MENDES Precision, directness, and quickness are what human beings are good at. What we have never been good...
SUE HUBBELL The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but ...
T. S. ELIOT That's Susan. She's always doing stuff like that.
KRISTA RAPPAHAHN How do you know if something is real? That’s easy. Does it change you? Does it form you? Does it g...
C. JOYBELL C. I have always believed that there is a need for life-affirming films.
ANTHONY MINGHELLA We can never be entirely original, as artists or as people. The genius and vision of those who came ...
JESSICA LAVE You will always be a monster - there is no turning back from it. But what kind of monster you become...
JULIE KAGAWA Bitcoin frees people from trying to operate in a modern market economy.
TIMOTHY C. DRAPER Honor is but an itch in youthful blood of doing acts extravagantly good
SAMUEL HOWARD Honour is but an itch in youthful blood
Of doing acts extravagantly good.
SAMUEL HOWARD Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
GEORGE ORWELL The difference being that in films, unlike in life, good does always win over evil in the end.
AJAY DEVGAN When looking for evidence that something exists, it's silly
to start by assuming that it is impossib...
LEWIS N. ROE Using the scientific knowledge that we
currently possess, we can take simple logical steps, backed b...
LEWIS N. ROE The atheist might have
no proof for the
supernatural, but they
also have no proof
against it. If we ...
LEWIS N. ROE There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass...
JOE WRIGHT One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life; that word is love.
SOPHOCLES One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.
SOPHOCLES One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.
STING Hiding in all the thorns, there is a yellow rose.
BEN OAK I was always quite good with accents - I always had quite a good ear - so from the age of about 13, ...
KATE WINSLET Our life is a series of moments. Let them all go. Moments. All gathering towards this one.
NOW IS GOOD To believe in God is a good thing, a right thing. But when you reinforce your belief with words you ...
V.C. ANDREWS I would say that the matter is not entirely behind us. We have got to draw conclusions from this.
MARTIN BARTENSTEIN I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I me...
EDMUND WHITE When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. ...
ERIK PEVERNAGIE There are many films in which minority groups are caricatured to the point where truth is all togeth...
JOHN GARFIELD I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI The good news is that Christ frees us from the need to obnoxiously focus on our goodness, our commit...
STEVE BROWN I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and s...
MARINA ABRAMOVIC Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.
TERRY PRATCHETT I want to believe that there is enough good in all of us to be marvelously good if we’re daring en...
CRAIG D. LOUNSBROUGH Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all a...
DON DELILLO The choice that frees or imprisons us is the choice of love or fear. Love liberates. Fear imprisons.
GARY ZUKAV In the films the good guy always wins, but this is one bad guy who ain't gonna lose.
SONNY LISTON Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
CHAD HARBACH One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.
SOPHOCLES One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.
SOPHOCLES Nowadays, a critic has to watch 700, 800 films a year, and I know through experience, being a juror ...
ALEJANDRO GONZALEZ INARRITU Death frees from the fear of dying
PAULO COELHO It doesn't do a lot of good for me to interpret the study if nobody knows about it. There is value i...
ANDREW W. LITT I was sent to boarding school - a grim place. The only good thing the headmaster did for us was ever...
KEVIN BROWNLOW There is a story, there is a scene which you always miss and you never pay attention at it... (The R...
DEYTH BANGER Wake up to a brand new day and realize why you woke up to meet the day! Live to the end of another d...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH She loves Susan Sarandon and I know my dad (would have loved) being married to Susan Sarandon, ... S...
CAMERON CROWE Whether you say that a god does exist, or that none do, it is a claim
to know (or at least believe i...
LEWIS N. ROE Letting go helps us to to live in a more peaceful state of mind and helps restore our balance. It al...
MELODY BEATTIE Plunging in “truths” about God is like walking on the bottom of a sea that is not there, searchi...
MARIANA FULGER In a good literary memoir, you're basically rendering the essence of the experience. Whether someone...
JOYCE JOHNSON Life may change, but it may fly not; Hope may vanish, but can die not; Truth be veiled, but still it...
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curi...
ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY I like to go from mainstream movies to more artsy films. I don't sign on for the money. Maybe I ...
FAMKE JANSSEN And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I have dreamed a dream, and there is none that can interpret it: and I...
BIBLE Truth metastasized into lurid fantasy.
F. MULDER why these films aren't loved by audiences anymore. What we have to do is make great films -- that al...
WALT DISNEY But no one frees himself from being in love in three days.
ISABELLE ADJANI Writing is the incurable itch that possesses many.
JUVENAL Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.
ANA CLAUDIA ANTUNES In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good b...
TERRY PRATCHETT Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C. Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.
KARL LAGERFELD Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained ...
BARBARA BUSH To have the time to reminisce is one of the futures gifts. Don't think to much, don't live to fast, ...
CALVIN WILSON We are the masters of our own destinies we shape and mould our lives into to the circumstances surro...
GARY F EVANS... I think it's in our nature to try to get beyond that next horizon. I think that when we, as a sp...
RON HOWARD Coming out of the '60s and the Vietnam War in America, it was commonplace for people to make fil...
DAN GILROY You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it'...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch ...
ROBERT PENN WARREN I have compassion for Susan and I have to come from a caring place when I hear that.
DANIEL HOROWITZ Always interpret the hidden treasures of your dream.
JOEL LOCKTA
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 ...
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 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