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Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.


Susan Sontag

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She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour a...
PAUL AUSTER All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.
BLAISE PASCAL All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.
BLAISE PASCAL All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
BLAISE PASCAL Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag.
SUSAN SONTAG All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
BLAISE PASCAL She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag]
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT After having my best year in the slams last year, it's probably been one of my most disappointing,
TIM HENMAN Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ...
CAITLIN MORAN Simultaneously, my two biggest heroes are Susan Sontag and Morticia Addams from 'The Addams Fami...
CAITLIN MORAN It seems important to me that beginning writers ponder this—that since 1964, I have never had a bo...
JOSEPH HANSEN In Hanover Park they highlighted the terrible plight of backyard dwellers and the fact that year aft...
MANGOSUTHU BUTHELEZI Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE 2005 was my best year ever. Although for the past few years I've been able to say that every year.
BARRY BAKER Day after day I'm missing you. Week after week I'm forgetting you. Month after month I'm moving on. ...
MAHMOUD EL HALLAB I've worked with the pitching staff and the coaching staff and really honed in on what kind of pitch...
BRANDON WEBB What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, 'They lived happ...
SCOTT WESTERFELD Susan Boyle having a meltdown is not controversial. It's human for a 48-year-old recluse to get ...
SHAWN AMOS Somehow, I've been blessed to be able to have the young spirit inside - not feel like every year...
RICKEY HENDERSON Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON Volume has been pretty light. Tomorrow could rival the Friday after Thanksgiving for the slowest day...
ADAM TRACY It's been our motto all year to make it to the NCAA Tournament. That's what we're working on every d...
AMANDA BROWN Performance had been mixed early in the year, but they finished on par with last year after a strong...
JOSH ROSENBERG Having your goal to focus on is key, but don't let it become more important than your excellence nex...
BILL RODGERS Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society ma...
NAOMI WOLF We voluntarily chose to do it, which means it could last for one day or one year, it depends on us,
HASSAN ROWHANI All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
BLAISE PASCAL I'm not all that concerned about having to replace guys. I've done that everywhere. If you plan on h...
ANDY LOPEZ I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t...
SALLY MANN It's probably more gratifying to them because of what they've been through, not that it's been their...
MIKE DUNLEAVY If you tell an 11-year-old something on a constant basis every day, every day, eventually you're goi...
CAROL WILLIAMS Obviously it was a difficult decision after having a tremendous year.
BRENDA FRESE We're having a $100 million, trophy-building-a-day kind of year in sales.
DAN FASULO Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every ye...
VIRGINIA WOOLF It's really been flourishing year after year. It's getting to be a big thing.
CHRIS BAXTER He's having a real solid year. He's probably why, through the first two-thirds of the year, we were ...
DEAN CLARK Comic strips are like a public utility. They're supposed to be there 365 days a year, and you...
GARRY TRUDEAU My dad would go to work every day and write in a room full of funny people. He enjoyed it. I know gr...
JOSS WHEDON I work every day hard. I put my body through hell. Let me tell you, every year, seven months of the ...
MO FARAH I think what makes a strong team is being able to have a group of girls where maybe not one of them ...
ERIC HOWE After having a great first year, and a terrible second year, a sketchy start to this year, I was sta...
WADE DUBIELEWICZ Every year there's been a rumor that coach Davis would not be here and every year I'm back. I wanted...
MIKE DAVIS The guy's been on the bubble almost every year he's been here. But he's a survivor.
LANCE JOHNSTONE Just looking back on the last year, it's been a crazy one, but it's been amazing. Just being able to...
BRANDON SNYDER Unlike a merchant association, this is not a voluntary organization. We need to be able to count on ...
DEBBIE BAKER This is going to be a very difficult year for me, to sit out. I've had a uniform on every year since...
FRED HOIBERG When I first started editing a 'Year's Best' volume in the '70s, the job was pretty ...
GARDNER DOZOIS Shamrock only exists on St. Patrick's Day. Every other day of the year, it's just young clover.
CHARLES NELSON For the first year we rescued 250 ferrets and after that it's been 375 to 400 a year.
CJ JONES Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything right...
RALPH WALDO EMERSON Susan [Stocker] and John [Rose] being away this year has created some personnel issues in the depart...
MICHAEL CURRY That depends ... am I in the final year of my contract?
ALEXEI YASHIN The number of steers we keep on hand depends on the time of year.
HEATHER GUTIERREZ One key quality of all global achievers is that, they keep improving day after day. They set standar...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR And, everyday is someone's birthday,
MAXINE CLARK That's a problem, too. We've been having injuries all year. That's been killing us. We're having to ...
RASAAN POWELL We've maintained that consistency on offense and have been able to score runs all year.
ANDY NIETO Noah has come out of almost complete obscurity. Last year he was getting about eight to 12 minutes a...
MIKE MORAN The call volume has been higher and more steady than preceding some of the hurricanes we had last ye...
BRAD DEAN They made a lot of moves last year to ensure the title, so it's really a credit to the Hunter brothe...
DICK TODD It stinks. I didn't play (here) last year after having an opportunity, and this year I'm just not ab...
JAMES DRISCOLL The Port of New Orleans alone imports 250,000 tons of coffee every year.
MARK ZANDI We're having a good season. The guys that are in the locker room have overcome some tough periods of...
ANDREW FERENCE Guys said some key things in the room to stay confident. We've been coming back on teams all year. W...
BRACKEN KEARNS We have a really balanced team, a nice mix of veterans and young guys. They've worked extremely hard...
IAN HEARN If you look at the traffic we expect on Interstate 81 in the year 2035, and you took every truck off...
LAURA BULLOCK Well, for a nine year old kid to be able to earn $110 in one day compared to $10 for a paper round, ...
KURT RUSSELL Maybe that's what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit t...
EMILY GIFFIN Getting beat on every day that year helped make me the wrestler I am today.
BRANDON LOCOCO It's been a year and a half since anybody's actually been able to ride anywhere.
BRIAN MCMAHON I've been getting better with every match, ... After a few games I was able to read her serve, which...
ANASTASIA MYSKINA We've been able to put him on the other team's top guard all year and he does a great job.
ED GOETZ Black jurors sit on juries every day and convict black people every day.
JOHNNIE COCHRAN We're quite confident that we'll be able to compete ... We have been gaining market share year over ...
LORI FISHER Her record, year after year, is dismal on the environment.
BILL ALLAYAUD This year... when this 80 is booked, we will have sold 100 planes in China, so we are well on our wa...
ROB LAIRD It feels amazing. After having the flu and getting knocked out early last year, I definitely had som...
ERIC BRENNAN We had such a good response the first year, we made it annual and continue doing it year after year....
MEGAN DORFNER Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything right...
RALPH WALDO EMERSON: The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limi...
JAMES A. MICHENER The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limit...
JAMES A. MICHENER It's our main holiday of the year. What a neat day to be able to give back to people in the communit...
JEFF KEPLAR It is one thing to speak kindly to an irritating stranger on Monday. It is quite another thing to go...
JOAN D. CHITTISTER We can find a new hope every new day and every New Year.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA Last year was pretty rough after having such a strong start. This year, we put even more time into i...
CLAYTON SMITH Every year a farmer in the area donates a pig for the temple on this day. There are fifteen farmers,...
CHUN HUANG I think what he is doing this season, all of us ? players, coaches and media in particular ? should ...
DAVE LEITAO I raced locally for a year, went to Europe the year after and went to the Olympics the year after th...
TAYLOR PHINNEY A year after winning the Oscar, almost to the day, I was directing a dog food commercial.
PETER CAPALDI Our team is working very hard and had a great summer of base building, running every day, ... Our go...
CITY HIGH Our team is working very hard and had a great summer of base building, running every day. Our goal, ...
JAYME SKAY I really think I can help out behind the plate. I'm really looking forward to next year. It's been r...
ANDREW FRITZ On any given day, the government is spending millions of taxpayer dollars, but we simply have no vis...
CHRISTOPHER YUKINS If you spend all your time reading books that you only pretend to understand, year after year, there...
CATHLEEN SCHINE In the 13 years ended 2004, that group was growing at a 1 to 4 percent rate every year. Last year, f...
BOB SIMONSON She's definitely a leader on the team and has been having a great season. We have a talented group t...
BUDD BOOTH Ahh, Earth Day, the only day of the year where being able to hacky-sack will get you laid.
JON STEWART I've been starting in new places year after year after year. It's just like when I went to G...
THALIA It's picking up every day. Monday -- after we win -- you won't be able to get in the door.
MARCIA HELLMAN

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 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