We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag
Related Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag. SUSAN SONTAG 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 In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats ... NOAM CHOMSKY She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT These two leaders are determined to carry on this fight against terror, not by making statements, no... EHUD OLMERT We welcome every move towards lightening the shadow of the nuclear terror under which we live today, ATAL BEHARI VAJPAYEE Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the... FRANCISCO GOYA Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the... GOYA I know people socially who live in countries where the wealth gap is more extreme than it is in Amer... JAMIE JOHNSON I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to t... SALLY MANN A lot of people think we are a total magnet school, ... Really, we are an elementary school with a m... GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER A lot of people think we are a total magnet school. Really, we are an elementary school with a magne... CATHEY HENDRICKS Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a... SALMAN RUSHDIE The Biggest Threat to our Democracy, Freedoms and Future is Leadership that fosters and Appeases the... MICHAEL HARRIS Common sense is perhaps the most equally divided, but surely the most under-employed, talent in th... CHRISTIANE COLLANGE Today's reckless allegation by Senator Kerry that the president is overemphasizing the threat of ter... MARC RACICOT Horror by definition is the emotion of pure revulsion. Terror of the same standard, is that of fearf... DARIO ARGENTO If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people ins... MARGARET HALSEY [The] decision brings to an end years of wasted court resources brought about by a fringe group of p... JENNIFER PIZER Most have service. There may be a straggler or two in there, but by and large we think we've got it ... BOB ELEK I'm a perfectionist. And that's served me very well in my career. It allows me to handle the... HENRY SAMUELI We do not want to live under the yoke of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. MARINE LE PEN We're excited about that. Twin has always been a good rivalry, and the 7 p.m. start allows more peop... GREG GVOZDAS 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 The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the wor... VIRGINIA POSTREL When faced with two equally tough choices, most people choose the third choice: to not choose. JAROD KINTZ Being a "Walter Mitty" in the martial arts is popular, but it is not practical. ROBERTO TORRES LIFESTYLE TRAINER In general, I'm opposed to any industrialization of Long Island Sound, ... It's appalling to think o... JOHN OPIE The Islamic terror threat is so fierce, unrelenting and barbaric that we tell ourselves fairy tales ... MONICA CROWLEY I was seized by doubt. Should I have come here? But going back was impossible. I had fled a known te... RICHARD WRIGHT It is generally believed that it is the students who derive benefit by working under the guidance of... C. V. RAMAN Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society ma... NAOMI WOLF You live with people, you live with “things”. Which is most important in your life? RODEL NATIVIDAD CASIO The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as... EDWARD GIBBON The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as... EDWARD GIBBON The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the... MAHATMA GANDHI Growing up during the Cold War, I remember the seemingly imminent threat of nuclear war. In primary ... MIKE QUIGLEY I don't have an all-embracing vision which people have to buy. I'm simply trying to work wit... DAVID WHYTE People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty t... OSCAR WILDE [Like People magazine, which started as a page in Time before becoming one of the country's most pop... CHRIS ALLEN Israel, contrary to most of the West, has a high fertility rate, so there's a lot of young peopl... NAFTALI BENNETT We must live out love by respecting the authority of the home office in Nashville. We must live out ... JANET LEDFORD For several years, people weren't quite sure what fantasy football was. But the NFL did a survey two... GREG AMBROSIUS The biggest threat to an organization and it's culture is anyone on a leadership team that has a min... MICHAEL HARRIS There is no reason why humanity cannot be served equally by weighty and trivial motives. ERIC HOFFER I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and s... MARINA ABRAMOVIC THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought ... MARK TWAIN The administration is in a bubble sitting in the green zone surrounded by barricades and barriers. Y... LOREN JENKINS 35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give... JAMES C. DOBSON It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where saf... SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL It may be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a stage in this story where safet... WINSTON CHURCHILL While both these statements refer to eggs, the main difference between these two rather irking state... CHRISTINA ENGELA Nothing proves evolution more than the survival of the religious belief. It shows we are still fearf... CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS We learn simply by the exposure of living, and what we learn most natively is the tradition in which... DAVID P. GARDNER My tax dollar, which goes to New York State Council on the Arts, is by and large only spent to fund ... ROBERT WILSON Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is... THOMAS JEFFERSON Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have... STANLEY CROUCH It is equally safe and equally reliable, but it is half the fuel we consume when pushing the airplan... ATHAR KHAN Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inh... VOLTAIRE In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused b... JAMES E. GUNN In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused b... JAMES GUNN Teen problem novels? I can go through them like a box of chocolates. And there are fantasy books out... TAMORA PIERCE The Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act that the President signed in September allows people to make a ... BRENDAN HURLEY Life without playing music is inconceivable for me. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in t... ALBERT EINSTEIN Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry, an... LAURIE BUCHANAN, PHD My father taught me many important giving lessons, but two stand out. First, always give as much as ... LAURA ARRILLAGA-ANDREESSEN For most people love is a fantasy but for others it is a fantasy that can become a reality DANNY OQUENDO See the world as it is, not as you wish it would be E. LOCKHART We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of ... EDWARD ABBEY Populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower work... JIM HIGHTOWER I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened ... TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Why bother with a cunning plan when a simple one will do? TERRY PRATCHETT (Heritage Plaza) is exactly the kind of building we would like to see downtown, ... The zoning allow... TOM DALE It does certainly seem like everyone is interested in AOL these days, particularly because of its (l... GARY STEIN We aren't opposed to interconnection, but it should be under equal conditions. We are governed by sp... FERNANDO CABRERA If you look at fantasy for most people, they could go to Nepal. They could do it. But for most peopl... JAY RASULO In most of these places, 65 percent or 70 percent of the people who live in trailer parks are senior... ED SPERAW It is hard to imagine two more final endings to the 'war on terror' than the popular revolts... PETER BERGEN It is by these, the people, that I have been clothed with the high powers which they have seen fit t... JOHN TYLER It allows people to identify what foods are most important to them, look at the cost to their health... KAREN COLLINS It lost by one vote because one of the large (rural electric associations) was opposed to it. RICK GILLIAM This witnessing consciousness, this formless dimension of yourself, is the awareness in which your e... JOSEPH P. KAUFFMAN No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent dea... THOMAS HOBBES will not live under the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb. YOSEF LAPID Out of the welter of life, a few people are selected for us by the accident of temporary confinement... ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH I perceive two things in Scotland of the most fearful omen: ignorance of theological truth, and a re... EDWARD IRVING The stirrings within us have their own fearful excesses; the excesses show which way these stirrings... GEORGE BATAILLE One seemingly small mistake - that most people don't think of as anything - can have ramifications f... LINDA SHERRY Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters. JEFFREY FRY One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two ... ADAM RIESS Manifestation is a process by which we transform seemingly unrealizable imaginations to reality. DEBASISH MRIDHA
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 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