Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.


Susan Sontag

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Life is weird and wonderful like that, is it not.
SONYA.E.WILLIAMS
It is a lie.
ARTHUR MILLER
The only good bourgeois is a dead bourgeois.
POL POT
It is what it is, it is what you make it.
JAMES DURBIN
I am Happy and satisfied with what I am. 10000 will take me wrong, 1000 will go against me, 100 will...
NEHA KOTHARI
If our mind was an ocean then every now and then we would have the perfect storm happening in it.Gar...
GARY F EVANS...
I regret that I wasn't more successful with my marriages, but it is what it is.
TED TURNER
To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois
JULES RENARD
To stand on the
brink of what is coming, feeling eager, optimistic anticipation—with no feeli...
ASK AND IT IS GIVEN
Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY
Often, alas, the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois.
EUGENE IONESCO
All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager...
JULIO CORTáZAR
Unpredictability means what it means. I don't know how you define it. It is what it is.
MICHAEL KEATON
When I die it will be game over,... but I know one life is short, to be selfish is not the best deci...
DEYTH BANGER
It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delive...
DAN FLAVIN
With '10,000,' our aim was to make a film that was entertaining and a roller-coaster ride; i...
STEVEN STRAIT
Life is not all about sticking or stopping your thoughts to old memories but LIFE STARTS when you st...
NEHA KOTHARI
The king may rule the kingdom, but it's the queen who moves the board.
D.M. TIMNEY
I never like it when a celebrity goes on Twitter and says, 'This isn't true!' It is what...
HARRY STYLES
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG
Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and prole...
ROLAND BARTHES
I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix.
DEYTH BANGER
Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.
JOSEPH A. SCHUMPETER
I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn’t exist,
That there are hills, valleys,...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
You know, I don't think my music is important, I don't think it's changing the world, I ...
SUFJAN STEVENS
See the world for what it is.
BEAUTIFUL!
ANTHONY T. HINCKS
There was no Jace Wayland more real than the one he saw in her eyes when she looked at him.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Bourgeois society is not fundamentally opposed to the bourgeois women's movement, which is prove...
CLARA ZETKIN
I think at its most mature, love is a very bourgeois state. There is something about luxuriating in ...
ALEXANDRA CASSAVETES
Being present is being connected to All Things.
S. KELLEY HARRELL, M. DIV.
The trend is towards the bourgeois-smug.
GUNTER GRASS
One must astonish the bourgeois.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer'...
EDVARD MUNCH
Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.
Things are the only hidden meaning ...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
You get to the point where you're like, 'I'm just doing me, and if people don't like...
BEBE REXHA
I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.
ALBERTO CAEIRO
What Fucks me... is that we both are the same... we all walk on the same path... but everything is a...
DEYTH BANGER
I never had a problem with my face on screen. I thought it is what it is, and I was turned off by ac...
ROBERT REDFORD
Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties lea...
DAVID HARVEY
How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.
D.H. LAWRENCE
I take the good with the bad. I always wanted to be a comic, and part of that, for me, was that I wa...
ERIK GRIFFIN
What is it that makes you so angry, bothers you so deeply, that you're compelled to act?
CRAIG GROESCHEL
it's always important to do what you want, Life is too short to live with Regrets.
SHELLI THOMPSON
I'm not an Emontional, but how???
I live with the thought that "Nothing can be returned, it has...
DEYTH BANGER
Our life is a series of moments. Let them all go. Moments. All gathering towards this one.
NOW IS GOOD
She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor,
EMILY HARRIS
The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.
But what does someone who hates and love...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT
When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily mani...
DAVE GROHL
Soho is a gritty former mercantile area that has, of course, evolved into the most bourgeois neighbo...
ANDRE BALAZS
When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. ...
ERIK PEVERNAGIE
Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
J.R. RIM
He had a harder time helping her out though. He was asleep while she was doing stars. Without wings,...
LAURIE FRANKEL
Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
CAITLIN MORAN
Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the wo...
ROSA LUXEMBURG
More important, it's because God is our only true source of life.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,
And Spring came the day after tomorrow,
I would die...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
The Madden Curse has really taken on a life of its own. People just love talking about it, and it is...
DREW BREES
Between what i see in a field and what I see in another field
There passes for a moment the fig...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
It’s an already inside outside,
The philosophers say it’s the soul
But it’s not the ...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn’t have limits. Existence me...
ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS
I'm probably the least harsh on myself, and I try not to scrutinize everything about my body. As...
KOURTNEY KARDASHIAN
Not everybody wants be texting their 15-year-old asking how his math tutor was. They would rather be...
RENEE JAMES
His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING
A lot of people say there's a fine line between genius and insanity. I don't think there's a fine li...
BILL BAILEY
I love you; I love you and I don’t care that you’re my sister; don’t be with him, don’t want...
CASSANDRA CLARE
The Queen gave him a look: special and secretive and shared between the two of them.You warned he...
CASSANDRA CLARE
I thought marriage was something very quiet and very regular and very bourgeois.
CARLA BRUNI
I live a bourgeois life.
MARK RUFFALO
Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and ...
ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY
What comes, when it comes, will be what it is.
ALBERTO CAEIRO
Night doesn’t fall for my eyes
But my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.
Be...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
I’m in no hurry: the sun and the moon aren’t, either.
Nobody goes faster than the legs they...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
It is what it is. I balled out, had some good years, man, had fun and did it with some guys and made...
CALVIN JOHNSON
The bourgeois are other people.
JULES RENARD
Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourg...
MILAN KUNDERA
Life is a re-discovery.
BRIAN BLESSED
If you think that life is a celebration full of party poppers and merry go rounds it's not it's a ga...
GARY F EVANS...
Life Is a Misconception.
DEYTH BANGER
Life is a desire!
DEYTH BANGER
To trust someone you must firstly remember that it is a two way street that will go all the way if y...
GARY F EVANS...
I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Even so, I’m somebody.
I’m the Discoverer of Nature.
I’m the Argonaut of true sensat...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and mora...
OCTAVIO PAZ
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
CESARE PAVESE
As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly de...
HENRY ADAMS
I was born subject like others to errors and defects,
But never to the error of wanting to unde...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
Accept the universe
As the gods gave it to you.
If the gods wanted to give you something e...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
I'm living with every step. I can't live with regret. The past is the past. I'm not worr...
RYAN SHECKLER
The enmity of such a party towards Socialism does not mean that the members are only prejudiced agai...
KARL RADEK
Mother Superior jump the gun...
-The Beatles, Happiness is a Warm Gun
LAUREN MYRACLE
The fear of God is the only cure for the fear of people.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
The man held himself still and turned his milk-flooded eyes on her. Fin felt something like vertigo ...
A.S. PETERSON
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the b...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the b...
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Subtle! Subtlety is bourgeois. Brecht us that when he popped drama’s cherry. He fucked drama until...
DAVID BURR GERRARD
Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
C. JOYBELL C.
In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty i...
DOUGLAS SIRK
I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t...
SALLY MANN
I'm one of my sensations.
ALBERTO CAEIRO

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
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
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