The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Susan Sontag
Related The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper... 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 It is what it is, it is what you make it. JAMES DURBIN I regret that I wasn't more successful with my marriages, but it is what it is. TED TURNER With '10,000,' our aim was to make a film that was entertaining and a roller-coaster ride; i... STEVEN STRAIT Unpredictability means what it means. I don't know how you define it. It is what it is. MICHAEL KEATON 37. It is better to be single and unhappy than unhappily married. JAMES C. DOBSON It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delive... DAN FLAVIN You know, I don't think my music is important, I don't think it's changing the world, I ... SUFJAN STEVENS I never like it when a celebrity goes on Twitter and says, 'This isn't true!' It is what... HARRY STYLES Not everybody wants be texting their 15-year-old asking how his math tutor was. They would rather be... RENEE JAMES I saw that there is no Nature, That Nature doesn’t exist, That there are hills, valleys,... ALBERTO CAEIRO See the world for what it is. BEAUTIFUL! ANTHONY T. HINCKS To stand on the brink of what is coming, feeling eager, optimistic anticipation—with no feeli... ASK AND IT IS GIVEN Things don’t have significance: they only have existence. Things are the only hidden meaning ... ALBERTO CAEIRO To be honest, there are no problems between me and Messi. People have their own opinions about who t... CRISTIANO RONALDO Tell your story to the universe and Let your actions speak LOVE.' No matter what it is. NAPZ CHERUB PELLAZO 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 is it that makes you so angry, bothers you so deeply, that you're compelled to act? CRAIG GROESCHEL 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 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 The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset. But what does someone who hates and love... 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 I'm probably the least harsh on myself, and I try not to scrutinize everything about my body. As... KOURTNEY KARDASHIAN When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily mani... DAVE GROHL It is a lie. ARTHUR MILLER If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, And Spring came the day after tomorrow, I would die... ALBERTO CAEIRO 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 Let your actions speak LOVE. No matter what it is. NAPZ CHERUB PELLAZO Using assistive technology with your child prevents your child from missing out on content solely be... SANDRA K. COOK You know that we've got a few problems we need to talk through before we get married." "I... SUSAN ELIZABETH PHILLIPS I consider a dream like I consider a shadow,” answered Caeiro, with his usual divine, unexpected p... ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS Even so, I’m somebody. I’m the Discoverer of Nature. I’m the Argonaut of true sensat... ALBERTO CAEIRO How do you know if something is real? That’s easy. Does it change you? Does it form you? Does it g... C. JOYBELL C. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it SARA SHEPARD 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 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 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 Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry, an... LAURIE BUCHANAN, PHD I'm not sure what the future holds but I do know that I'm going to be positive and not wake ... NICOLE KIDMAN 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 Life is not all about sticking or stopping your thoughts to old memories but LIFE STARTS when you st... NEHA KOTHARI ... it is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self-consciousness; to make us mo... JAMES JOSEPH SYLVESTER The artistic element of Manhattan has kind of moved to Brooklyn. Has it changed it? Yeah. Has it rui... JULIAN CASABLANCAS Life is weird and wonderful like that, is it not. SONYA.E.WILLIAMS Ques eso? Queso? NOLAN J. VANDER HAAGEN And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything. Who knows if I’ll be dead the ... ALBERTO CAEIRO What love is it, then, that has no need of words to call us? In whose image are we made, to take suc... CHRISTIAN BOBIN I'm just not into trying to convince people like me. I always say to myself, 'It is what it ... NENE LEAKES Sheep don’t need the shepherd to be what they are. The shepherd needs sheep to be what he is. LJUPKA CVETANOVA I'm one of my sensations. ALBERTO CAEIRO Boxing's a poor man's sport. We can't afford to play golf or tennis. It is what it is. I... SUGAR RAY LEONARD He had a harder time helping her out though. He was asleep while she was doing stars. Without wings,... LAURIE FRANKEL Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters. JEFFREY FRY Human is what he decides to be. ZAMAN ALI I have spend a lot of time on everything and what's impresses me about people I have written that in... DEYTH BANGER The king may rule the kingdom, but it's the queen who moves the board. D.M. TIMNEY I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, n... AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS There was no Jace Wayland more real than the one he saw in her eyes when she looked at him. CASSANDRA CLARE I speak the truth. Not everyone who says they are ready to hear it really are. MONIKA ZANDS It is better to be a pragmatist than a lunatic. DEBASISH MRIDHA The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to impro... BILL BEATTIE How to get it, I annoy you??? You are not interested??? What's the idea??? DEYTH BANGER But what you’re calling poetry is what everything is. It’s not even poetry — it’s seeing. Th... ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS When push comes to shove would people do what they felt was right, to get justice done or would they... GARY F EVANS... I have Tourettes and Aspergers, but Tourrets and Aspergers don't have me. You know, I'm doin... JAMES DURBIN 35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give... JAMES C. DOBSON 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 not strength, but art, obtains the prize,
And to be swift is less than to be wise.
'Tis ... HOMER ("SMYRNS OF CHIOS") What is equity? It is the quality of citizens of a given society to relate to each other in fairness... SUNDAY ADELAJA There's no more film. Film is gone. We photograph digitally and electronically. We don't rea... STANLEY DONEN The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think -- rather to impr... JOHN DEWEY More important, it's because God is our only true source of life. CRAIG GROESCHEL For an optimist, life is full of opportunity. For a pessimist, life is full of adversity. Life is wh... DEBASISH MRIDHA Time determines the occurrence of possibilities and impossibilities, but God determines the time for... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH We all are wearing many hundred glasses of different colors. Therefore, everyone sees the world in d... MUDITHA CHAMPIKA If it's about what I like, I like opera as a music and deathstep and dubstep. DEYTH BANGER Next generations will not know what is to have childhood. DANIEL MELGAçO I want to be honest, and even if that's scary, I know it's worth it. EMM GRYNER Tomorrow is promised to no one. Prioritize today accordingly. GINA GREENLEE Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forc... AMIRI BARAKA Thought is more important than art. . . . To revere art and have no understanding of the process tha... IMAMU AMIRI BARAKA After all, what is art? Art is the creative process and it goes through all fields. Einstein’s the... PIET HEIN 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 When you give, you will be blessed. When you give, it will be given back to you. CRAIG GROESCHEL Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a limin... PHIL KLAY Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you... C. JOYBELL C. The giant white cube is now impeding rather than enhancing the rhythms of art. It preprograms a view... JERRY SALTZ I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive. MOBY To find why that happen and why this is happening, you should start from the beginning the problem c... DEYTH BANGER The art of the police is not to see what it is useless that it should see. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
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 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 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