FastSaying

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.


Susan Sontag

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

Related

We aren't either afraid or brave, we’re usually both.
BETH KEMPTON Redheaded women are either violent or false, and usually are both
FRENCH PROVERB A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship an...
FAWN M. BRODIE She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Either one is promiscuous or in a relationship - it cannot be both at the same time.
ABHIJIT NASKAR Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG Time & money are one of a kind,both can either be spent or invested.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) I want to be a good man, a good writer."
"Be one or the other, Ernest, not both.
NAOMI WOOD Date sideways, never up or down. sideways is usually a more comfortable position for both players an...
JULIANNE BALMAIN I want both of them practicing with a number one mentality.
BOBBY BOWDEN She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT They're cheap for a reason. They're either very little, or they need work, or both.
BARBARA HOWLAND Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.
GLORIA STEINEM After the war, and until the day of his death, his position on almost every public question was eith...
THEODORE ROOSEVELT After the war, and until the day of his death, his position on almost every public question was eith...
THEODORE ROOSEVELT In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.
AYN RAND Either you are homophobic or you are a human - you cannot be both.
ABHIJIT NASKAR Either you are racist or you are a human - you cannot be both.
ABHIJIT NASKAR Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
CAITLIN MORAN A son or daughter in any human family is either born to or adopted by the parents. By definition, a ...
JERRY BRIDGES Anyone who says they're not afraid at the time of a hurricane is either a fool or a liar, or a l...
ANDERSON COOPER I was drawn to things I thought were either sexy or aggressive - or both.
ADAM CLAYTON One has to be either crazy or sexually frustrated to be a good writer.
YAMIN RASHEED Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami...
CAITLIN MORAN You either control inflation or the exchange rate. You can't do both.
HENRY STIPP Words come alive from a page or script because both the writer and actor were brave enough to neithe...
VAL UCHENDU For spirits when they please Can either sex assume, or both.
JOHN MILTON You can either grow old gracefully or begrudgingly. I chose both.
ROGER MOORE We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every f...
ALAN CHEUSE You usually get a good receiving tight end who can't block much or a good blocker who isn't much of ...
ART KEHOE Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The terrifying fear of a crash had triggered the fight-or-flight response in the child, making him b...
PAWAN MISHRA the lines have been drawn, either whine or take the challenge, just not both
DANIEL LEDESMA Perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.
JAMES BALDWIN As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-sufferin...
ADRIENNE RICH You can either use the elevator for the loft or the ranch but not both. If it went to both units, th...
STEVEN SCHNEEMANN Back in the day, it was either both a mother and her daughter had pubic hair, or the daughter didn�...
MOKOKOMA MOKHONOANA There were three on their side, the other nine were upright with either one or both sets of wheels o...
JIM FEENY Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know?
SARAH DESSEN There is no peace among equals because equality doesn't exist in this universe. Either one prevails ...
HAROLD J. DUARTE-BERNHARDT You can either go home with enough money or enough excuses, but not both!
HARSHVARDHAN MALPANI I always take blushing either for a sign of guilt, or of ill breeding.
WILLIAM CONGREVE You can have either the Resurrection or you can have Liberace. But you can't have both.
LIBERACE There is a definite horse race between the two of them. But this is a massive market. It is not an e...
DAVID HILAL I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.
CARL SANDBURG You can try to stop either Jesse or Justin. You can't stop both, and for a time there, Greater Latro...
DAVE FRYER Sadness usually results from one of the following causes either when a man does not succeed, or is a...
SENECA a broken heart or a lonely child.. both tends to shatter when the things go wild.. one comes to moth...
ROHAN He had a night where if he got it in his hands, he was either going to get to the foul line or hit a...
JOSH MCPHERSON The viewer I picture in my mind when I do 'The Kelly File' is a woman who's had a long d...
MEGYN KELLY If you are not getting the results you want you are either not working hard enough or not working sm...
JEFFREY BENJAMIN It is likely the force of the blast disabled both cameras. You cannot hear or see anything else on e...
DAN HARRIS One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art.
FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL I've always wondered, am I a writer who preaches or a preacher who writes? I don't know. I l...
JOHN PIPER The only pledge I'd believe is, if either one or both of them said, 'I'm going to be mayor in 2007 a...
GENE RUSSIANOFF The Bible is the only credible guide either as to the real relationship between man and the earth an...
JOSEPH FRANKLIN RUTHERFORD I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally boun...
LAURENCE STERNE I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally boun...
LAURENCE STERNE Since the late 1920s Texas has almost consistently had a member of the high leadership in either the...
CAL JILLSON If someone gets married at 15, they're either dumb or pregnant. I was both.
CARLENE CARTER Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers...
GORE VIDAL His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha...
TEKOA MANNING You're either feeding the spirit and starving the flesh or feeding the flesh and starving the spirit...
FATHOM I don't want a girl who only feels comfortable in either a temple or a discotheque. She has to be bo...
SOHIL ASHVIN SHAH A man of guilt acknowledges and changes himself immediately on being hinted slightly about his fault...
ANUJ SOMANY Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrify...
ARTHUR C. CLARKE You can have either the Resurrection or you can have Liberace. But you can't have both.
LIBERACE The talking about own material pleasure or preaching others for enjoying their monetary treasure is ...
ANUJ SOMANY I do consider myself a Norwegian writer, or a Scandinavian writer, as my family tree reaches into bo...
PER PETTERSON Either give me your hand, or end it now, and put us both out of our misery
JUDITH MCNAUGHT You can't have it both ways. Either you believe in my god or you go to hell
BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA If something happens to either Brian or Book, they'd be rotating in and they'll both play well.
JAMIL WALKER If life gives you lemons...you know you have a Herculean hangover. Either that, or you're holding Te...
PRABHUDOSS SAMUEL Railing and praising were his usual themes; and both showed his judgment in extremes. Either over vi...
JOHN DRYDEN Secessionists, whether in Scotland, Catalonia, Quebec or anywhere else, invariably assume that a per...
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF After that he became very reclusive and guilt-ridden.
DONNA WING A diplomat is one that says something that is equally misunderstood by both sides, and never clear t...
WILL ROGERS We're not looking at this as an either/or, ... There's ...
PAUL TAGLIABUE Today's woman doesn't have emotional or financial security. She has to go out and compete within a h...
BARBARA FELDON I don't usually like teen novels written in the present tense, particularly those told from a fi...
TONY BRADMAN Losing one or both of them would be devastating.
DARRELL WEST We should get one or both back next week.
LARRY PETERSON Either we head into a more serious crisis, which will hit economic growth, or we abandon reform for ...
MARC TOUATI The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
GEORGE ELIOT The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can't be co-opted by ei...
TIMOTHY J. KELLER One Must Choose Among Both Parties Either To Be A Wise Man That Die To Live In Righteousness And Bli...
BABA TUNDE OJO-OLUBIYO Is it poor recruiting or a bad environment? Probably both.
JENNIFER DUFFY The thing that often surprises the noble heart the most as to how people in large numbers on earth c...
ANUJ SOMANY Probably... or maybe... one day!
DEYTH BANGER Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both exist...
SENECA Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both exist...
LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one ...
MARGARET ATWOOD Susan Boyle having a meltdown is not controversial. It's human for a 48-year-old recluse to get ...
SHAWN AMOS We're pretty much in the range that's been publicly discussed, ... Four games plus either a fifth ga...
TOM HANSEN I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My hones...
SOREN KIERKEGAARD I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My hon...
SøREN KIERKEGAARD Rarely do you find both in one person and you can't do everything yourself. You are either a creativ...
AMANDA WAKELEY but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.
JANE AUSTEN True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt a...
R. D. LAING I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t...
SALLY MANN

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 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 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