Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being.
Susan Sontag
Related Along with aging comes life experience, so in every way that is consistent with even being human, Le... CARRIE FISHER Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag. SUSAN SONTAG Most men are very attached to the idea of being male, and usually experience a lot of fear and insec... ANDREW COHEN It is a lie. ARTHUR MILLER The more you are getting older, you lose a little something. Of course there is another advantage, b... HAILE GEBRSELASSIE He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth ... ALBERT CAMUS 23. With God, even when nothing is happening...something is happening. JAMES C. DOBSON Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and mos... LOUIS MACNEICE I regret that I wasn't more successful with my marriages, but it is what it is. TED TURNER By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes. E.M. FORSTER It was a shame. Samuel is a human being and he felt bad on the field but I was pleased with the atti... FRANK RIJKAARD I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because m... GLORIA STEINEM Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can't retire his experience. He must use it. E... BERNARD BARUCH Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can't retire his experience. He must use it. E... BERNARD M. BARUCH Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I've had a lot of experience with that. CARL SAGAN The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the m... FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can't retire his experience. He must use i... BERNARD BARUCH I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix. DEYTH BANGER For much of my life, I existed in a condition of regret, a regret that was contemporaneous with expe... GREG BAXTER Is it men or women who work the
most in slaughterhouses?
Is it men or women who are
most involved in... O ANNA NIEMUS „Ein Mensch kann niemals Tier werden, er stürzt am Tier vorbei in den Abgrund MARLEN HAUSHOFER A meal is the whole experience of getting together and sharing with friends. It is more than food. JINNY FLEISCHMAN But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk... GEORGE ELIOT Most people will experience the full range of human emotion during their lives. It is best to learn ... TERENCE T. GORSKI She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT There are older men with younger women but you don't see a lot of older women with younger men. ... TORI AMOS I write the black experience in America, and contained within that experience, because it is a human... AUGUST WILSON It was something Ferdo said. We may not have it all, you and I, but we have more than is granted mos... MARY BROCK JONES It's not that women don't enjoy spending free time with their children, but it is a different experi... LIANA SAYER Love, in short is the most dangerous emotion human can experience V.C. ANDREWS Being a sex symbol has to do with an attitude, not looks. Most men think it's looks, most women kno... KATHLEEN TURNER Being a sex symbol has to do with an attitude, not looks. Most men think it's looks, most women know... KATHLEEN TURNER Being a sex symbol has to do with an attitude, not looks. Most men think it's looks, most women kno... KATHLEEN TURNER Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time. NICHOLAS SPARKS only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incompre... RAINER MARIA RILKE For most entertainers, there is a single experience, one defining moment, when confidence replaces t... CHARLEY PRIDE While there is no shame in being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or intersex - or even straight ... CHRISTINA ENGELA Even the most despicable person is still a human being. STELLAN SKARSGARD What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG My ability to tolerate shame, to compartmentalize it, to swallow it, increased right along with my b... EDWARD UGEL It's getting better but men still earn more and there are more jobs for them. Ageism is a big th... JULIE WALTERS Godliness with contentment is rare. CRAIG GROESCHEL All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibil... NATHANIEL BRANDEN Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it. EDWARD F. HALIFAX Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it. EDWARD WOOD, 1ST EARL OF HALIFAX Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women; ... ANDREA DWORKIN Most human beings strongly believe that money is way less important than the life of a human being, ... MOKOKOMA MOKHONOANA I find that the acting's getting easier - with experience, everything is more instinctual. EWAN MCGREGOR But I'm kind of comfortable with getting older because it's better than the other option, wh... GEORGE CLOONEY Because even if you spend your life chasing the immaterial, listening to the most exquisite classica... KAMAND KOJOURI What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine w... SUSAN SONTAG The most exciting part of this is I'm going there with a serious contender that has earned a lot of ... MIKE TROMBETTA I'm a thinker. That is what I do, in great depth and detail, every waking moment of the day. I like ... BRIAN HERBERT Unification of differences is power. SHESH NATH VERNWAL I dont know who it is to blame. Men for treating women like nothing till they were the most revealin... ANUJ SOMANY I dont know who it is to blame. Men for treating women like nothing till they were the most revealin... AL STADLER Happiness is true, even though it fades, and meaning is also true, despite the fact that it endures.... JAMES CASTLETON, MD, MENDING OF A BROKEN HEART To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has pa... SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE We have people we admire, like Einstein, saying mystery is the most beautiful thing a human being ca... MARK RYLANCE Women are not attracted to men because they are good looking. Women are attracted to men because the... NICK KINSELLA Slavery is something that is all too often swept under the carpet. The shame doesn't even belong... LUPITA NYONG'O Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of... HERBERT READ Women are women: the most beautiful creatures, I love and respect. But hoes and tricks, gets slapped... 2SHADDY Being a woman and being gay is really a unique position in our society. I know in my experience of a... LAURA RICKETTS She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT The world is the true classroom. The most rewarding and important type of learning is through experi... JACK HANNA He is an aggressive young fighter. He came to try and prove something, which is good in some ways. I... KOSTYA TSZYU Life is a Long Journey between Human Being and Being Human. Let's take at least one step each d... DRISHTI BABLANI 35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give... JAMES C. DOBSON Experience is always a great thing, ... The older you are, the wiser you get. We've got some guys wi... DEREK MORRIS Men are just as vain as women, and sometimes even more so. HELENA RUBINSTEIN I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to ... ALBERT CAMUS Most women don't like good men. They say they want a good buy, but most women always wind up wit... STEPHANIE MILLS My experience is that the teachers we need most are the people we’re living with now. BYRON KATIE Some very plausible stuff is being written by women in a way that most men are not doing. AMY CLAMPITT It is a system that is broken, ... Men, women and children are getting hurt with that current law, w... CATHIE ADAMS Optimism with some experience behind it is much more energizing than plain old experience with a cer... TWYLA THARP Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it has given me me . It has provide... ANNE LAMOTT I think everything you do in life is a learning experience. EMERAUDE TOUBIA In my experience with women that I've dated and my wife now, is you have to know what they care abou... TIM MEADOWS It is a fact that all women contribute more to marriage than men; for the most part they have to cha... AGNES MACPHAIL Life is a magical game so play it with love. DEBASISH MRIDHA Destiny is something men select; women achieve it only by default or stupendous suffering. HARRIET ROSENSTEIN I think the fallacy is to think that Women's Liberation meant that men and women would become in... CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS 'Social Network' is a good story with human experience connective tissue that makes it agele... MICHAEL DE LUCA A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, gr... CRISS JAMI What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG We have a citizen Legislature, and the public is reflected in its Legislature. Most people probably ... ELIZABETH SMITH In my view, Tom is the most worthy, not because he's a friend of mine but because he has the experie... ED KRAUSE The most beautiful women I have known had one thing in common apart from beauty: humility. It's a sh... DONNA LYNN HOPE For most men, [breast cancer] is not a hereditary thing, but it's more likely to be hereditary in me... DEBBIE SASLOW Computer programming has been traditionally seen as something that is beyond most people - it's ... MITCHEL RESNICK The older we women grow, the more clearly we see what men really are: hypocrites, boasters, he-goats... JEAN GIRAUDOUX No, but it's not because I'm getting older that I'm trying to accelerate. But something ... PATRICE LECONTE This was really something special for me – getting the opportunity to come back and play before th... GERRY MCNAMARA This was really something special for me getting the opportunity to come back and play before the... GERRY MCNAMARA I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them are trash. SIGMUND FREUD I'm still getting more familiar with the plays and different things, but I think that will come alon... CHRIS PAUL But if somebody dies, if something happens to you, there is a normal process of depression, it is pa... BOB GELDOF
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 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 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