What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being -- while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. Normally we don't experience, at least don't want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not.


Susan Sontag

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

Related

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Only fools wait, and only tools bait.
CRE
The role of the Christian is to let other people know what Jesus has done, not to think of themselve...
LEWIS N. ROE
Naturalistic atheism debunks itself. It has no power to explain even some of the most basic principl...
LEWIS N. ROE
It's important to understand that if someone calls themselves a Christian, it does not automatically...
LEWIS N. ROE
A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung...
PETER WESSEL ZAPFFE
Our greatest heart-treasure is a knowledge that there is in creation an individual to whom our exist...
MILES FRANKLIN
There are approximately two trillion cells in the human body. You are never alone, there are always ...
DWIGHT W. HAYES
How lucky I am to have known somebody and something that saying goodbye to is so damned awful.
EVANS G. VALENS
35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give...
JAMES C. DOBSON
The atheist might have no proof for the supernatural, but they also have no proof against it. If we ...
LEWIS N. ROE
It's the same thing that drives people to want to experience sexual pleasure or have one too man...
ADAM ARKIN
A lot of teenagers write to me and say "I want to write a book. I want to get published." And those ...
MAUREEN JOHNSON
Are we our bodies? Is a small person less than a big person, then? If we were our bodies, then when ...
TERRY GOODKIND
It is a lie.
ARTHUR MILLER
Whether you say that a god does exist, or that none do, it is a claim to know (or at least believe i...
LEWIS N. ROE
Unsubscribe from should-a, would-a, could-a
MICHAEL H. DANSBURY
As far back as history records people thinking, thinking people have been befuddled by the mysteries...
LEWIS N. ROE
People live for eating,but I eat for survive
OM BENIWAL
In Cloud computing the difference between a dark cloud and a cloud with a silver lining, is the part...
RAJAT MOHAN
For me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is not only from the same r...
YVES KLEIN
Eventually I came across another passage. This is what it said:
I am not commanding you, but I ...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
To kill a mockingbird. If you haven't read it, I think you should because it is very interesting.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I will never forget the vision of Jamie walking towards me.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
As these images were going through my head, my breathing suddenly went still. I looked at Jamie, the...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
You don't have to learn much out of books, it's like if you want to learn about cows, you go milk on...
HARPER LEE
You can't really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.
HARPER LEE
Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow...
BETTY FRIEDAN
It's sweet and everything, but it's like you're not even there sometimes. It's great that you can li...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I'm a non-believer. I don't believe in the existence of a God. I don't believe in the Christian dogm...
JANE RULE
The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception...
SAM HARRIS
Existential anguish derives from the human freedom to think and act, experience love for life, and f...
KILROY J. OLDSTER
Would you want you as a friend?
PETER STROPLE
It should not be surprised by seeing in our weird world that the people for enjoying own bread can a...
ANUJ SOMANY
Everyone out there is using you for their entertainment and what you mostly need is to be entertainm...
SUPERNA BATHEJA
The existence of homosexuality, not as a circumstantial matter of passing sexual whim, but as a shar...
GREGORY WOODS
To shy away from human extremes and human sensuality makes for bone-dry fiction. A world parched of ...
ALLAN GURGANUS
Having been shown the possibility that God exists, the atheist has chosen not to accept it. They hav...
LEWIS N. ROE
The scientific method gives us information by testing and repeating observable things so that we can...
LEWIS N. ROE
The claim to know that no god exists is just irrational. The non-existence of any god has no evidenc...
LEWIS N. ROE
Power, of course. The primitive fear of being controlled. It does not matter whether it is an invasi...
WOLE SOYINKA
Life is a re-discovery.
BRIAN BLESSED
Boredom – the psychological state that we experience whenever we are uninterested in what we are c...
KILROY J. OLDSTER
The shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or a...
NEIL GAIMAN
If you think that life is a celebration full of party poppers and merry go rounds it's not it's a ga...
GARY F EVANS...
Life Is a Misconception.
DEYTH BANGER
Life is a desire!
DEYTH BANGER
There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success ...
ERIC HOFFER
This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Po...
TERRY PRATCHETT
One, a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;...
ISAAC ASIMOV
If you think like a leader, act like a leader, inspire like a leader then you are a leader.
DEBASISH MRIDHA
Life is not a game. Still, in this life, we choose the games we live to play.
J.R. RIM
Whether at work, at home or in public, we have been trained to believe that who we are at the core o...
IYANLA VANZANT
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a l...
LANCE ARMSTRONG
I do not give a damn whether a person is a scientist, a philosopher or a theologian If that person c...
ABHIJIT NASKAR
We are far from perfect but willing to be different.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
It is reserved for man alone to find his very existence questionable, to experience the whole dubiou...
VICTOR FRANKL
Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
The results of our research are clear: Most college students encounter sexual harassment on their ca...
ELENA SILVA
The moment WE realize our mistakes, our sins, our selfishness, the trouble we gave others, the pain ...
NEHA KOTHARI
A Ritual to Read to Each Other


If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and...
WILLIAM STAFFORD
Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it appears to be.
JEFFREY FRY
For me, my life is a journey.
JAY ELECTRONICA
Lᴏᴠᴇ ɪs ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡɪɴᴅ ... Yᴏᴜ ᴄᴀɴ'ᴛ sᴇᴇ ɪᴛ, ʙᴜᴛ ʏᴏ...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
She filed the image away as an excellent and insulting question to ask the earl at an utterly inappr...
GAIL CARRIGER
Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they n...
JOSé SARAMAGO
It is our wounds that create in us a desire to reach for miracles. The fulfillment of such miracles ...
JOCELYN SORIANO
You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to...
STEVE TOLTZ
It is our destiny to live with the wrong as well as the right kind of citizens, and to learn from th...
HENRY MILLER
As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and str...
EDWARD WITTEN
Another kind of love and compassion is not based on something appearing beautiful or nice, but based...
DALAI LAMA
Life is a Long Journey between Human Being and Being Human. Let's take at least one step
each d...
DRISHTI BABLANI
Imagine life as a game, a game that is filled with obstacles and hazards to overcome but sometimes y...
GARY F EVANS...
Life is a risk.
CARMELO ANTHONY
The question is not, will there be difficulties and threats to our existence, but how will we deal w...
BERNIE SIEGEL
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness o...
CARL GUSTAV JUNG
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness o...
CARL JUNG
By virtue of being born to humanity, every human being has a right to the development and fulfillmen...
ASHLEY MONTAGU
Often autism is portrayed in the media as a very negative condition, as something that prevents some...
DANIEL TAMMET
[W]e need not become fixated upon our own suffering, whatever its origin. We offer it up, thus parti...
JEAN-YVES LELOUP
What I find very attractive, what I find sexual, are people who are unapologetic for who they are an...
KATHERINE MOENNIG
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the...
MILAN KUNDERA
BLOCKBUSTER Online does not throttle. When we say our service offers unlimited rentals, we mean it. ...
SHANE EVANGELIST
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters...
VIKTOR E. FRANKL
Among our own people also the church sorely needs clergy in close touch with the ordinary life of th...
ROLAND ALLEN
The world pays no attention to those who have nothing to offer
BERNARD KELVIN CLIVE
Keeping shoppers happy while they are on the site is just one piece of the satisfaction equation. A ...
LARRY FREED
It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for...
FREDERICK BUECHNER
Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One lear...
ALAN W. WATTS
Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"

A robot may not injure a human being or, through ...
ISAAC ASIMOV
Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So...
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
We declare our right on this earth to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be give...
MALCOLM X
We declare our right on this earth...to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be gi...
MALCOLM X
To trust someone you must firstly remember that it is a two way street that will go all the way if y...
GARY F EVANS...
How do you know if something is real? That’s easy. Does it change you? Does it form you? Does it g...
C. JOYBELL C.
What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
HENRY MILLER
Without music, life is a journey through a desert.
PAT CONROY
Life is a journey. When we stop, things don't go right.
POPE FRANCIS
Plunging in “truths” about God is like walking on the bottom of a sea that is not there, searchi...
MARIANA FULGER

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
Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative...
SUSAN SONTAG
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
SUSAN SONTAG
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the...
SUSAN SONTAG
Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men...
SUSAN SONTAG
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,...
SUSAN SONTAG
Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
SUSAN SONTAG
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting...
SUSAN SONTAG
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,...
SUSAN SONTAG
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ...
SUSAN SONTAG
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder...
SUSAN SONTAG
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa...
SUSAN SONTAG
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
SUSAN SONTAG
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG
Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us...
SUSAN SONTAG
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n...
SUSAN SONTAG
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ...
SUSAN SONTAG
What we need is to use what we have.
SUSAN SONTAG
Sanity is a cozy lie.
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
SUSAN SONTAG
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,...
SUSAN SONTAG
The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and...
SUSAN SONTAG
Taste has no system and no proofs.
SUSAN SONTAG
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture...
SUSAN SONTAG
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves....
SUSAN SONTAG
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o...
SUSAN SONTAG
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kind...
SUSAN SONTAG
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
SUSAN SONTAG
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
SUSAN SONTAG
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability....
SUSAN SONTAG
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people t...
SUSAN SONTAG
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
SUSAN SONTAG
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
SUSAN SONTAG
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of...
SUSAN SONTAG
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
SUSAN SONTAG
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
SUSAN SONTAG
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists...
SUSAN SONTAG
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
SUSAN SONTAG
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine w...
SUSAN SONTAG
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less intere...
SUSAN SONTAG
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the s...
SUSAN SONTAG
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured m...
SUSAN SONTAG
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
SUSAN SONTAG
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wis...
SUSAN SONTAG
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
SUSAN SONTAG
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
SUSAN SONTAG
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past...
SUSAN SONTAG
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, th...
SUSAN SONTAG
My library is an archive of longings.
SUSAN SONTAG
We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the cal...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper...
SUSAN SONTAG
We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if n...
SUSAN SONTAG
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...
SUSAN SONTAG
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after yea...
SUSAN SONTAG
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams
SUSAN SONTAG
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really h...
SUSAN SONTAG
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p...
SUSAN SONTAG
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on va...
SUSAN SONTAG
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an ind...
SUSAN SONTAG
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to w...
SUSAN SONTAG
Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
SUSAN SONTAG
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational term...
SUSAN SONTAG
The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in...
SUSAN SONTAG
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p...
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle...
SUSAN SONTAG
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remai...
SUSAN SONTAG
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a pass...
SUSAN SONTAG
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exagge...
SUSAN SONTAG
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love o...
SUSAN SONTAG
It is not the position, but the disposition.
SUSAN SONTAG
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions
SUSAN SONTAG
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by...
SUSAN SONTAG
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Pre...
SUSAN SONTAG
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
SUSAN SONTAG
Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l...
SUSAN SONTAG
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
SUSAN SONTAG
All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memor...
SUSAN SONTAG
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion o...
SUSAN SONTAG
American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
SUSAN SONTAG
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or t...
SUSAN SONTAG
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s...
SUSAN SONTAG
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citiz...
SUSAN SONTAG
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [...
SUSAN SONTAG
People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens...
SUSAN SONTAG
So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympath...
SUSAN SONTAG
All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If ...
SUSAN SONTAG
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which doe...
SUSAN SONTAG
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs ar...
SUSAN SONTAG
Desire has no history...
SUSAN SONTAG
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism...
SUSAN SONTAG
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--on...
SUSAN SONTAG
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics...
SUSAN SONTAG
Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri...
SUSAN SONTAG
How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!
SUSAN SONTAG
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel...
SUSAN SONTAG
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ...
SUSAN SONTAG
I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
SUSAN SONTAG
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c...
SUSAN SONTAG
[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.
SUSAN SONTAG
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...
SUSAN SONTAG
Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo...
SUSAN SONTAG
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp...
SUSAN SONTAG
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
SUSAN SONTAG
Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extensi...
SUSAN SONTAG
Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
SUSAN SONTAG
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read...
SUSAN SONTAG
All photographs are memento mori.
SUSAN SONTAG
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper...
SUSAN SONTAG
The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual dis...
SUSAN SONTAG
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize,
SUSAN SONTAG
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc...
SUSAN SONTAG
This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of b...
SUSAN SONTAG
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...
SUSAN SONTAG
It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow t...
SUSAN SONTAG
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged,...
SUSAN SONTAG
The Way We Live Now
SUSAN SONTAG
Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that...
SUSAN SONTAG
In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of styli...
SUSAN SONTAG
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
SUSAN SONTAG
With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
SUSAN SONTAG
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
SUSAN SONTAG
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "vi...
SUSAN SONTAG
Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to det...
SUSAN SONTAG
The aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by ne...
SUSAN SONTAG
It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking...
SUSAN SONTAG
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo...
SUSAN SONTAG
Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled re...
SUSAN SONTAG
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other pe...
SUSAN SONTAG
One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The na...
SUSAN SONTAG
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations...
SUSAN SONTAG
[Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A ...
SUSAN SONTAG
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ...
SUSAN SONTAG
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste...
SUSAN SONTAG
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
SUSAN SONTAG
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou...
SUSAN SONTAG
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women...
SUSAN SONTAG
Perversity is the muse of modern literature
SUSAN SONTAG
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual ...
SUSAN SONTAG
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou...
SUSAN SONTAG
My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything,'
SUSAN SONTAG
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them
SUSAN SONTAG
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of...
SUSAN SONTAG
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
SUSAN SONTAG
A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. ...
SUSAN SONTAG