Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
SUSAN SONTAG She was indomitable. [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 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 She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami...
CAITLIN MORAN I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t...
SALLY MANN When a man gives you a rose what you see may not be what he intends. You may think he sees you as de...
PATRICK ROTHFUSS Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The interpretation of dreams is a great art.
PARACELSUS Art is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone will have their own interpretation.
E.A. BUCCHIANERI When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move.
SUN TZU The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.
PABLO CASALS Love is a growing, or full constant light,
And his first minute, after noon, is night.
JOHN DONNE Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ...
SUSAN SONTAG Art is life's dream interpretation.
OTTO RANK To be angry is to revenge the faults of others upon ourselves
ALEXANDER POPE Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society ma...
NAOMI WOLF In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art ...
SUSAN SONTAG Knowledge is intellectual art.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA [About Susan Sontag] Her quest for meaning, for significance was endless. She described life more as...
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT A dark and towering shadow, rising like the phoenix from the ashes...malevolent...omnipotent...The P...
SUSAN KAY When the ships had lifted, they returned across the river to the silence of death. Then his grandfat...
JACK VANCE I am the foremost collector of velvet Elvii in the city of Chicago," I said at once.
"El...
JIM BUTCHER You speak good words, child, but sometimes what lies within is much darker. The line between justice...
AMIRA ALY I don't know if I have a favorite color.
KATE MIDDLETON It's very special having a new little girl.
KATE MIDDLETON In spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more import...
ERICH FROMM Hard to restrain, unstable is this mind; it flits wherever it lists. Good it is to control the mind....
GAUTAMA BUDDHA We should not force our own interpretation upon others.
GUS DUR Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?
MARK LAWRENCE Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
KARL WILHELM FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL The secret of my success is my hairspray.
RICHARD GERE Love is blind, and a deaf-mute too.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS All in the Family was intellectual; it was art.
CARROLL O'CONNOR Knowledge is an intellectual art.
Wisdom is a spiritual discipline.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA I've learned that from a war ignited by revenge, nothing can be born, but sorrow. - Aladdin
SHINOBU OHTAKA Yes," said Locke."Yes, Master Ibelius. I'm going to put that fucker in the dirt as deeply as any man...
SCOTT LYNCH Midnight's the only time where you can be both in the past, present, and future.
RACHEL VAN DYKEN She said 'Over my dead body!' so I took her at her word.
DIANA WYNNE JONES The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being a...
NEIL GAIMAN What is the Other?" they ask.
The Other is the one who taught me whatI should be like, but not ...
PAULO COELHO To search the sands of a lost desert for truth and justice in this world today you might as well be ...
GARY F EVANS... Today is about the now, the moment you live in, so do now what you want to do
SOTONYE ANGA I always like to leave art and music open to interpretation.
DAN REYNOLDS No more tears now; I will think upon revenge.
MARY STUART Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education...
EDWARD THORNDIKE The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of anot...
LOUISE BOGAN I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and s...
MARINA ABRAMOVIC I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I me...
EDMUND WHITE The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan ...
BETH HENLEY Look, my friends!' he called. 'Here's a pretty hobbit-skin to wrap an elven princeling in! If it wer...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation...
RAY BRADBURY Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C. I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name...
DOUGLAS ADAMS It's all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you're properly trained.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Like all best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II My husband has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years, and I owe him a debt greater ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have to be seen to be believed.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughou...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss, ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I myself prefer my New Zealand eggs for breakfast.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II To what greater inspiration and counsel can we turn than to the imperishable truth to be found in th...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something e...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts an...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Grief is the price we pay for love.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a nobl...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II At Christmas, I am always struck by how the spirit of togetherness lies also at the heart of the Chr...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses w...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your s...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are g...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the man...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II These wretched babies don't come until they are ready.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II The events that I have attended to mark my Diamond Jubilee have been a humbling experience. It has t...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace ...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and o...
QUEEN ELIZABETH II Art builds upon art, builds upon art...nothing is purely original. We're all inspired by something.....
SHANNON TAYLOR HODNETT The battle is not physical, it is spiritual and your mind is the battleground. Keep your mind pure a...
JEANETTE CORON I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES
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 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 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