Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.


Susan Sontag

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
SUSAN SONTAG
Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.
STéPHANE MALLARMé
Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.
STEPHANE MALLARME
You're full of contradictions, Ms. Wallace."
I looked up at him and arched a brow. "I'm a girl...
TAMMARA WEBBER
Art must be parochial in the beginning to be cosmopolitan in the end.
GEORGE A. MOORE
In the end it doesn't matter what you do.
HARRISON BIRTWISTLE
In the end, crime doesn't pay.
LANE GARRISON
My gymnasts are always the best-prepared in the world. And they win. In the end, that's what mat...
BELA KAROLYI
Better to play dumb than to go as smartass… after all smartasses get what they deserve in the end....
DEYTH BANGER
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Injustice in the end produces independence.
VOLTAIRE
It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.
BONO
I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahea...
RICHARD YATES
This digital world is what you make of it in the end.
CIARA
Everyone and Everything is conspiring to end up in a book.
AMAN JASSAL
Meditation is painful in the beginning but it bestows immortal Bliss and supreme joy in the end.
SWAMI SIVANANDA
Imagine life as a game, a game that is filled with obstacles and hazards to overcome but sometimes y...
GARY F EVANS...
One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Everything in moderation.
GIADA DE LAURENTIIS
The only way he could have her was to shatter this stubborn faith of hers. In doing so, would he sha...
FRANCINE RIVERS
Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
The French poet Mallarmé and, after him, Borges, claimed that “everything in the world exists to ...
MIRELLA MUFFAROTTO
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
But all bubbles have a way of bursting or being deflated in the end.
BARRY GIBB
In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
It is not what I do, it is the way I do it, that will get me in the end.
ANNE WILSON SCHAEF
In the end, Arik believes in security above all and is a salient pragmatist, a disciple of Ben-Gurio...
REUVEN RIVLIN
In the end, rational policy is always good.
PAUL KEATING
In the end, I'm an actor. I'm paid for what I bring to the screen.
ERIC BRAEDEN
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality o...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
If I provide for this life and turn away from the Lord, I am wise for a moment, but lost forever.
FRANCINE RIVERS
The only way he could have her was to shatter this stubborn faith of hers. In doing so, would he sha...
FRANCINE RIVERS
Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.
MARCUS AURELIUS
She was intimidating and all I could do was sit back on the couch as she paced back and forth, slowl...
IN THE MAKING
When you read a book, you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're re...
NINA JACOBSON
I try hope that in the end, we will live in a cancer-free world. We want to live disease-free lives.
AARON CIECHANOVER
In the end, you have to write like you're not afraid of the critics.
MAGGIE STIEFVATER
Whenever books are burned, men also in the end are burned.
HEINRICH HEINE
In the end, to do a good accent, you just have to be a good listener.
ABBEY LEE KERSHAW
But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple.
LEO ORNSTEIN
In the end it's about the work, not an award you get for the work.
LINDA FIORENTINO
Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
ELLEN GLASGOW
In the end, I want to spend my 60s writing bonkbusters like Jilly Cooper.
CAITLIN MORAN
There is in the end no remedy but truth. It is the one course that cannot be evil.
ELLIS PETERS
Yes, I am the Olympic champion, but this is not the end of it. I want all the gold that there is out...
ADELINA SOTNIKOVA
We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. ...
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Allie, what do the Stars tell me to do? You know I don't understand the scientific part.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable- from table tapping to the s...
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
It is strange being in a crowd where no one knows your face or cares for your purpose. In Lykos, I w...
PIERCE BROWN
Einstein said, if everything exists as a substance of qualities, and qualities exist only in mind, t...
DYAN CANNON
You know, you do need mentors, but in the end, you really just need to believe in yourself.
DIANA ROSS
This instant is the only time there is.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
I am never upset for the reason I think.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Teach only love for that is what you are.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Only my condemnation injures me.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
I can elect to change all thoughts that hurt.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Only your mind can produce fear.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
warned me that the tenuous balance that exists in my brain is easily set off kilter, but like everyt...
MARYA HORNBACHER
Be lost. Give up. Give In. in the end It would be better to surrender before you begin. be lost. Be ...
VICTORIA SCHWAB
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
Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.
JACK KEROUAC
For you [God] are infinite and never change. In you 'today' never comes to an end: and yet our 'toda...
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
I've learnt that you are who you are, and in the end, if you don't believe it, then no one w...
USHER
Fallible characters are more interesting than superheroes in the end.
DAMIAN LEWIS
In the end, it all comes to choices to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones.
AMBER FREY
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselve...
FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a...
BARACK OBAMA
In the end, it's a mental maturity to let your best come out.
LINDSEY VONN
America has a critical place to play in the end of extreme poverty.
HUGH EVANS
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
MARK STRAND
In the end we're all Jerry Springer Show guests, really, we just haven't been on the show.
MARILYN MANSON
In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring.
GREGORY BENFORD
In the end no segregationist scheme has withstood the force of a simple idea: equality under law.
ERIC LIU
I always want my books to reach a positive point in the end.
CECELIA AHERN
I'm not here to battle anybody. In the end it's just an instrument. That shouldn't be a ...
ERIC SAN
People will always show their true selves in the end.
LEONA LEWIS
Everything exists as information in a field of infinite possibilities, and it is our Consciousness t...
JOSEPH P. KAUFFMAN
Everything that exists is information, and everything that is informative also exists. The infospher...
HUBERT BURDA
What is more important in a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that i...
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it ...
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
Time is a teacher which in the end it kills all it's students. (Synchronicity 2015 Film)
DEYTH BANGER
I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're able to pretend they are.
MADELEINE L'ENGLE
Even Lot might have been mistaken. But that’s what he promised ‘em – his virgin daughters, you...
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
God is the strength in which I trust." Lesson 47, A Course In Miracles
HELEN SCHUCMAN
There isn't an hour of my life without you in it. I mend the boats, test them and all the while the ...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
Use your heart. Understand. Learn to see things
in the now, not as they were or will be, or as ...
E.J. PATTEN
Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don't rent them out to to...
JERRY SPINELLI
In the end, I need to be fulfilled in my work - that's more important than the money.
T. R. KNIGHT
Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it is detestable to me that might will triumph in the...
KAREL CAPEK
In the end, you're measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish.
DONALD TRUMP
It takes two guys on a team to do very well in the end and be successful.
ED BELFOUR
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there ...
WINSTON CHURCHILL
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. I...
CHARLES EAMES
In the end, you need to be a little masochistic to be a goalkeeper. A masochist and egocentric as we...
GIANLUIGI BUFFON
By putting the employee first, the customer effectively comes first by default, and in the end, the ...
RICHARD BRANSON
You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of ...
HO CHI MINH

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
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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