[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement -- not incitement.
Susan Sontag
Related I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ... KELLY JONES She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ... CAITLIN MORAN The rules only applied to people who couldn’t afford different rules. CAMERON STRACHER I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t... SALLY MANN As time begins to pass, I have come to find that what I thought was, wasn't what I thought was so. ASTRAEA L. SKYLAR Paul's one thing was committing to forget about the past, to forge ahead into the future. CRAIG GROESCHEL The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about l... ALAN BENNETT And the day came out... the mask was removed... and who was behind it? ... No Face... a pe... DEYTH BANGER Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a... SALMAN RUSHDIE This was one of those games where you've got to shower, wash it off, and come back and be ready for ... BRUCE BOCHY I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and s... MARINA ABRAMOVIC If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not... C.S. LEWIS My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of ... JANET FITCH The insistent drums were an unwelcome reminder of the existence of another world, wholly autonomous,... PAUL BOWLES [About Susan Sontag] Her quest for meaning, for significance was endless. She described life more as... MICHAEL SILVERBLATT President Kennedy was willing to go to war. He was not a coward. The man had been in war and so had ... KEVIN COSTNER We can't go back to who we once were. We can only go on and become the person we were meant to be. ANTHONY T.HINCKS We made a series of bad decisions, one after another after another ? and not getting food and water ... BILL SATURNO Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag. SUSAN SONTAG At forty two years, Sona Kilroy stood tall and strapping, a powerful figure. Rising to the rank of A... CHRISTINA ENGELA Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I wa... WILL EISNER He was uniformly of an opinion which, though not a popular one, he was ready to aver, that the right... CHARLES JAMES FOX Poetry is the essence of life in which twinkling lights tickle the minds of readers and take them to... DEBASISH MRIDHA The passenger liner Ossifar Distana was one of the most luxurious of its kind in space anywhere. It ... CHRISTINA ENGELA No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not o... CHARLOTTE BRONTë Anyways, that very same night there was a fight in the casino on B Deck. Some of the passengers got ... CHRISTINA ENGELA Some read to learn, some to laugh, and some to live. JOYCE RACHELLE My world was changing, and I was not ready for it. JULIET MARILLIER It does not appear to be random, these two people did know each other and we're trying to come up wi... AARON DUNBAR Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others. OSCAR WILDE Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others OSCAR WILDE The bulkheads were close together, the ceilings low above their helmets. Not much space in there to ... CHRISTINA ENGELA It shouldn't have mattered, not when Miel and the other girls in his class wore jeans more than they... ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wro... KURT VONNEGUT We had Cathy over from Oahu to read in 2004, and not only was the event well attended but her readin... JULIE MITCHELL She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a l... KHALED HOSSEINI When I was 8, I was reading 'Gone with the Wind' and 'Pride and Prejudice' and all t... STEPHENIE MEYER Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape -- I didn't read to learn, I was reading to read. CHRISTIAN BAUMAN With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture b... BEVERLY CLEARY I knew this was a young team coming in and there was a lot of butterflies and jitters before the gam... JOE AUSTIN i know im not the girl you wanted. not the one you want to hear from. but what you see is what you g... SIMI GREWAL Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami... CAITLIN MORAN Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read A... JOAN DIDION 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 It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's. SUSAN SONTAG With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - li... SUSAN SONTAG What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-re... SUSAN SONTAG No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. SUSAN SONTAG It was hard to be out of the game. I have a young daughter, so I was keeping busy. But not playing f... AARON GIBSON 'Twas the saying of an ancient sage that humour was the only test
of gravity, and gravity of humour... SIR ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER, 7TH EARL OF SHAFTESBURY Not only was I ready to start the project. But, I'm ready to go out into the world and socialize aga... LISA IANNUCCI To enter the roadmap, there should be a full cessation of terror, hostilities and incitement, MR SHARON The environment I was raised in, you had to, to survive. MARK WAHLBERG I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyte... ERRI DE LUCA She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world t... SAMUEL JOHNSON I'm looking forward to this. This will be another opportunity for women of all ages to come together... EVELYN JONES I was a fan of 'Six Feet Under' and was very sad when it ended, so I was not ready to switch... DENIS O'HARE I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a stead... JOYCE CAROL OATES One of the first serious attempts I made to write a novel was when I was in Grade 6 and I had read &... RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH The message, which one fall or another of the coin would eventually give him, was how to get himself... PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP Yes, yes I blocked porn but this didn't stopped me from the real desire to watch videos... Still som... DEYTH BANGER Perhaps I had been in another world before I was born, and did not remember it, or perhaps I would s... LEMONY SNICKET Let me put it this way: when I read, I learned the world was not as small as my house. And that ever... TERRY MCMILLAN The real Liberace - and I'll preface this by saying that I didn't know the real one - was a ... RICHARD LAGRAVENESE She said, "Right now, while we have this time, I'm not going to do any of that other stuff. I'm goin... CRAIG GROESCHEL It's something we're watching, but not with great concern, ... I think there is room in the world fo... ALICE RIVLIN The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen. CARSON MCCULLERS My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon - this was before t... BEVERLY CLEARY But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began sear... JAMES BALDWIN Getting the second goal was huge, but then to come back with another one right away was a big bonus.... FRAN GOW Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel th... ROBERT REED It was our goal since the first day of camp to be in first place by the Olympic break. Now that we'v... DION PHANEUF All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book.I used to spend all my time rea... KATHRYN MAGENDIE I will not read the last page of novels first," I said, and then punched myself in the face. "... BRANDON SANDERSON I think what was great with the Cult was that we were allowed to evolve. We made different types of ... BILLY DUFFY Russia was the last to leave the 19th century and the most rapid to enter the mandates of the 20th c... AMOR TOWLES In the Europe which was created by the Second World War, divided into two blocks, each in need of a ... JUAN GOYTISOLO I was proud of our kids' effort today because it was not easy to come back after yesterday's disappo... ED MATHEY The Imperial Senate, ever conscious of the weight of public opinion resting on the tip of the pencil... CHRISTINA ENGELA The internet is killing the art of writing. The big "publish" button begs you to publish even before... BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA It's our ball and anything but that. It was a combination of execution. One guy not coming hard enou... JOE MIHALICH The three of us stood there for a minute. I don’t know what Stew was thinking, and the filing cabi... LEMONY SNICKET They were all talking about this amongst themselves - but it was not something that they shared with... WILL LEITCH A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it. DAVID MITCHELL Statistically, if you're reading this sentence, you're an oddball. The average American spends three... DICK MEYER I didn't know if it was going to come to me or not, but I was ready. The DB was looking back at the ... GREG CARR My marriage was breaking up, and my marriage with Chong was breaking up. I had to come back and kind... CHEECH MARIN This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and pla... WENDELL BERRY He was not only a great drummer but our favorite person to hang around with. He was this big, lovabl... JOE ELY Cam was sitting on the bed, still clothed. His head was lowered, hands braced on his knees in the po... LISA KLEYPAS While adhering to his convictions, with which one could agree or disagree, he was not dogmatic; he w... MIKHAIL GORBACHEV I'm so ready to come back. That was a dreadful trip. MODUPE ISHOLA I started this foundation when I was diagnosed. It was established for one reason, and that was to t... MONTEL WILLIAMS O! green bottle come & take my frustrations away,so says the drunk. DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of ... ALDOUS HUXLEY
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 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