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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.


Susan Sontag

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She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT The subjects are math, phonics, language arts, science, art, music and physical education, and histo...
CANDACE CRANDALL Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is ficti...
JEAN M. AUEL Art imitates life, but science fiction informs us about what form it will take.
ALAN JOSHUA There is something for everyone at our book sales. We usually have everything from science and scien...
ESTHER BUCK Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge rese...
ROBERT J. SAWYER Science/horror/Non-Fiction/Technology/Music/Games/Space... these are the subjects of future. The oth...
DEYTH BANGER You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap abo...
IAIN BANKS To use the enemy's weapon is to play the enemy's game...speak the truth and hear the truth.
URSULA K. LE GUIN Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science...
PHILIP K. DICK When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapol...
PAOLO BACIGALUPI There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are...
LOUIS PASTEUR Science fiction without the science just becomes, you know, sword and sorcery, basically stories abo...
MICHIO KAKU Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the histo...
RAY BRADBURY When you think about a destination brand, it is really about a science. This is not art, this is abo...
DUANE KNAPP Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about sci...
PHILIP K. DICK Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the...
PAMELA SARGENT Labels like 'Chinese Science Fiction' or 'Western Science Fiction' summarize a vast ...
KEN LIU … scientific thought does not mean thought about scientific subjects with long names. There are no...
WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD As with most of the future worlds in the science fiction, you are not talking about the future. You ...
ALAN MOORE Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters ...
JOHN PODHORETZ She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because sc...
JACOB BRONOWSKI Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because sci...
JACOB BRONOWSKI Questions are fiction, and answers are anything from more fiction to science-fiction.
SAUL STEINBERG The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeenth-century novels of exploration in fabulous ...
PHILIP K. DICK History is the science of things which are not repeated.
PAUL VALERY I love the early films of Al Pacino - 'Scarface,' 'Serpico' - and I love many scienc...
ORNELLA MUTI Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and h...
BRUCE STERLING For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.
C. J. CHERRYH I was a catastrophe at Science and Games, but the good thing about Quaker schools is that they encou...
RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers deal...
WALTER MOSLEY Your body has a beginning and an end; your body is subject to birth and death; but you, the spark of...
SCIENCE OF IDENTITY Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining.
BILL GAEDE Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of ...
MURIEL SPARK You look at science fiction and look how often it talks about being alien, being alienated about the...
NALO HOPKINSON Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligibl...
ROBERT J. SAWYER I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.
WILLIAM GIBSON Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind ...
RAY BRADBURY The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those...
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction write...
TAHMOH PENIKETT 'Filk' is the folk music of the science fiction and fantasy community - you get parodies, yo...
SEANAN MCGUIRE DNA films are delighted to continue our relationship with Danny Boyle and Alex Garland by producing ...
ANDREW MACDONALD Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of ...
MURIEL SPARK I'm not a fan of science fiction, personally,
LAKE BELL Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And tha...
PAUL SAMUELSON I was hoping it would, you know, gross somewhere around $30 million or something, which is what most...
GEORGE LUCAS Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami...
CAITLIN MORAN Science-fiction films were so involved with lots of screaming, and here comes a monster. It was a ce...
ANNE FRANCIS I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing ...
WALTER MOSLEY Science fiction fans are great, but they just aren't the same as groupies.
ROBERT PICARDO Women are being welcomed into science fiction, but it's through the back door.
ANNALEE NEWITZ We are here because over billions of years, countless variables fell into place, any of which could ...
WENDY MASS In really, really good science fiction, the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.
DAMON LINDELOF It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'...
TERRY PRATCHETT Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are di...
PAUL AMBROISE VALERY Science fiction has a way of letting you talk about where we are in the world and letting you be a b...
BRIT MARLING One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition t...
ROBERT J. SAWYER I really do like a really good science fiction movie and a really good horror movie. Those are the k...
PAUL GIAMATTI Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
URSULA K. LEGUIN We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life,...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE That's what science is about, ... This is about what's good science.
STEVE ABRAMS Science Fiction is a safe, fertile arena in which to rehearse the potential scientific facts of tomo...
STEWART STAFFORD Art and science are intrinsically the same except for one thing. The universe is in control of your ...
HARRY KROTO Business plans are a great section in the science fiction genre. They are made for the kind of peopl...
YOSSI VARDI I was not into sci-fi, science fiction, at all. I was into some of the old pirate films with Burt La...
MADS MIKKELSEN I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall ...
LOIS LOWRY Memorizing and regurgitating are not science. Real science is a constant investigation of the unknow...
ABHIJIT NASKAR The science which teacheth arts and handicrafts is merely science for the gaining of a living; but t...
THOMAS HOBBES Science is the art of reason.
OCTAV DRUTA There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and...
LOUIS PASTEUR The cool thing for me is, I go to a lot of conventions - a lot of science fiction conventions like C...
J. AUGUST RICHARDS Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion giv...
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevi...
ISAAC ASIMOV Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevit...
ISAAC ASIMOV The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or...
RICHARD DAWKINS The ultimate aim of reality is to become science fiction!
ELI OF KITTIM Because they are so humbled by their creations, engineers are naturally conservative in their expect...
HENRY PETROSKI There's always been a little bit of tension between the writers of science fiction literature an...
JOHN SCALZI Philadelphia's a good science-fiction town. There are many professional writers here, like Micha...
GARDNER DOZOIS I'd always wanted the show to be more reality based science fiction, something along the lines o...
GIL GERARD I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some ...
SARAH VOWELL With science fiction I think we are preparing ourselves for contact with them, whoever they may be.
DWIGHT SCHULTZ Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descr...
JONATHAN SACKS I read a lot of science fiction and biography - these are my two favorite genres. My favorite scienc...
BRAD FELD There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The ...
RAYMOND CHANDLER Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
CAITLIN MORAN I'm a science fiction author at heart, and what I like about the Cthulhu Mythos setting is that,...
DAVID CONYERS The assaying of tea is an art and not a science. It is the man, and not his instruments, which is th...
TIMOTHY MO Business is about the science of Quality Management…the science of getting happy customers and kee...
ALLAN AANONSON In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are al...
LORD EDWARD LYTTON In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are al...
AMY LOWELL Science is all about proving theories and understanding the universe. Science folds everything into ...
JULIE KAGAWA Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.
ROBERT BURTON There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The ...
RAYMOND CHANDLER Science is not just about seeing, it’s about measuring, preferably with something that’s not you...
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON Things are distinct not in their essence but in their appearance; in other words, in their relation ...
RABINDRANATH TAGORE What's interesting about science is that we're constantly discovering new things about the u...
JOE ROGAN Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.
WILLIAM GIBSON

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 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