Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.


Susan Sontag

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She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG
The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad ...
JOE ORTON
The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad ...
JOE ORTON
Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
CAITLIN MORAN
Taste is a matter of taste.
JAY MCINERNEY
If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. ...
MARCEL DUCHAMP
If you really taste a doughnut, it's pretty disgusting. They taste of grease.
RUTH REICHL
She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT
Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.
ARNOLD BENNETT
Good taste is better than bad taste but bad taste is better than no taste
ARNOLD BENNETT
Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami...
CAITLIN MORAN
Food is for taste. Happiness is taste of life.
KAZERONNIE MAK
It really leaves a bitter taste. It is shameful.
IVICA KOSTELIC
Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is o...
FRANÇOIS-RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND
Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is onl...
ALEXANDER POPE
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
PABLO PICASSO
Ah, good taste--What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
PABLO PICASSO
I wish you every kind of prosperity, with a little more taste.
ALAIN RENE LE SAGE
The ocean has only one taste, the taste of salt. Truth has only one taste, the taste of freedom.
BUDDHA
Those who fear failure do not want to know the real taste of success
ANUJ SOMANY
I remember ... how crazy this place was. I kind of got my first taste. We went downtown and saw ever...
JAY HENRY
They're a taste of your past, ... crave a taste of home.
ANNE BYRN
I suppose that I was a kind of consultant for taste. Is it good taste? Or bad taste? I had an attent...
JOHN HENCH
Dressing is a matter of taste, and I've met very few Republicans with good taste."
WILLIE BROWN
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste...
SUSAN SONTAG
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a cert...
BRIAN ENO
Good manners are a combination of intelligence, education, taste and style mixed together so that yo...
P. J. O'ROURKE
This is really based on taste buds. The more taste buds they have, the more sensitive they are. Thos...
DARBY WILLIAMS
My tomatoes taste like tomatoes used to taste, ought to taste and still do taste.
GEORGE DACY
It's really up to personal taste.
PETER JACKSON
There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions o...
HENRY JAMES
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recog...
HENRY JAMES
Good taste is boundless, while bad taste knows no bounds.
UNKNOWN
Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.
NIKKI GIOVANNI
I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t...
SALLY MANN
A city is a state - of mind, of taste, of opportunity. A city is a marketplace - where ideas are tra...
HERB CAEN
Italian style is a natural attitude. It is about a life of good taste. It doesn't have to be exp...
DIEGO DELLA VALLE
There is no accounting for taste and no taste for accounting.
KEVIN BYRNE
In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste.
RUSSELL LYNES
It's extremely bad taste, but bad taste is not against the law.
DEAN NELSON
Life is like a taste of honey, sour, bitter, spicy, salty. Hope you can taste the honey one day........
KAZERONNIE MAK
I'm cautiously optimistic. We have some really good sauces going up. We've been experimenting for ab...
DAVID SMITH
Last season left a bad taste in his mouth, I'm sure. He's got a good taste now.
CHRIS MALONEY
A spoon does not know the taste of soup, nor a learned fool the taste of wisdom.
PROVERB
A spoon does not know the taste of soup, nor a learned fool the taste of wisdom.
WELSH PROVERB
A spoon does not know the taste of soup, nor a learned fool the taste of wisdom.
WELSH PROVERB
Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.
FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT
Good taste doesn't exist. It is our taste. We have to be proud of it.
FRANCO MOSCHINO
Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of re...
G. C. (GEORG CHRISTOPH) LICHTENBERG
To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste ...
ELIA KAZAN
A Taste of Cherry.
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI
The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and...
SUSAN SONTAG
Mondays taste like split-pea soup,

Tuesdays taste like gobbledygook,

Wednesday...
CLAUDINE CARMEL
Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of taste.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
He had his choice, and he liked the worst.
JOHN CIARDI
The more bitterness we taste in sin, the more sweetness we shall taste in Christ.
THOMAS WATSON
Bad taste is a species of bad morals.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Bad taste is a species of bad morals.
CHRISTIAN NEVELL BOVEE
Being happy is a matter of personal taste.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
Taste is more to do with manners than appearances. Taste is both myth and reality; it is not a style...
STEPHEN BAYLEY
Taste is more to do with manners than appearances. Taste is both myth and reality; it is not a styl...
STEPHEN BAYLEY
Bad taste makes more millionaires than good taste.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
There's a taste in my mouth and it's no taste at all.

- Queen Bitch
DAVID BOWIE
Color is a matter of taste and of sensitivity.
EDOUARD MANET
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
GEORGE ELIOT
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
GEORGE ELIOT
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
T.S. ELIOT
Bipartisanship is really tough to achieve when everyone on both sides is left with a bad, bad taste ...
CAMPBELL BROWN
Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
PABLO PICASSO
Taste is the feminine of genius.
LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD
Taste is the feminine of genius.
EDWARD FITZGERALD
Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
PABLO PICASSO
Taste is the enemy of creativeness
PABLO PICASSO
Taking into account the public's regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent upon you not to fit in.
JANEANE GAROFALO
There is no point in arguing about matters of taste.
SOURCE UNKNOWN
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
E. M. FORSTER
Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life.
OSCAR WILDE
One man's poison Ivy is another man's spinach.
GEORGE ADE
Taste is, so to speak, the microscope of the judgment.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H. L. MENCKEN
We all have some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering it was an acquire...
CHARLES LAMB
I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appre...
ELBERT HUBBARD
Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherev...
HENRY ADAMS
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
MARSHALL MACLUHAN
It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is alwways the fir...
SALVADORE DALI
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN
Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting n...
KATHERINE F. GEROULD
Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.
JOSHUA REYNOLDS
Fish, to taste right, must swim 3 times -- in water, in butter and in wine.
POLISH PROVERB
Between good sense and good taste there lies the difference between a cause and its effect.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
Cinnamon bites and kisses simultaneously.
VANNA BONTA
For each mouth, a different soup.
PORTUGUESE PROVERB
It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the fir...
SALVADOR DALI
Taste: a quality possessed by persons without originality or moral courage.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.
GILDA RADNER
The world's worst flavor combination was mango and menthol.
RYū MURAKAMI

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...
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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
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