Sontag's Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Sontag's

Sontag's Quotes & Sayings

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In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. — Susan Sontag

The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates. — Susan Sontag

The place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience. — Susan Sontag

Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.) — Susan Sontag

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. — Susan Sontag

There's no changing the way people are. No one changes, everyone knows that. — Susan Sontag

The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate. — Susan Sontag

I love to read the way people love to watch television. — Susan Sontag

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex. — Susan Sontag

Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure. — Susan Sontag

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious. — Susan Sontag

It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's. — Susan Sontag

To look at something which is "empty" is still to be looking, still to be seeing something - if only the ghosts of one's own expectations. — Susan Sontag

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. — Susan Sontag

I like to feel dumb. That's how I know there's more in the world than me. — Susan Sontag

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize. — Susan Sontag

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing. — Susan Sontag

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart. — Susan Sontag

War has been the norm and peace the exception — Susan Sontag

With more people, there are more voices to tune out. — Susan Sontag

a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, — Susan Sontag

I am only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. — Susan Sontag

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. — Susan Sontag

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail. — Susan Sontag

Taste has no system and no proofs. — Susan Sontag

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. — Susan Sontag

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world. — Susan Sontag

Being self-conscious. Treating one's self as an other. Supervising oneself. — Susan Sontag

I vulgarize my feelings by speaking of them too readily to others. — Susan Sontag

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting. — Susan Sontag

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master. — Susan Sontag

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society. — Susan Sontag

I've become passive. I don't invent, I don't yearn. I manage, I cope. — Susan Sontag

Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption. — Susan Sontag

There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things. — Susan Sontag

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. — Susan Sontag

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else. — Susan Sontag

Art is a form of consciousness. — Susan Sontag

The really important thing is not to reject anything. — Susan Sontag

Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle. — Susan Sontag

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. — Susan Sontag

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence. — Susan Sontag

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures — Susan Sontag

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one. — Susan Sontag

It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin. — Susan Sontag

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive. — Susan Sontag

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another's ambitiousness. — Susan Sontag

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. — Susan Sontag

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes. — Susan Sontag

It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid. — Susan Sontag

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

Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrangement. — Susan Sontag

That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life. — Susan Sontag

Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished. — Susan Sontag

Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas. — Susan Sontag

When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. — Susan Sontag

Depression is melancholy minus its charms. — Susan Sontag

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. — Susan Sontag

The appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears. — Susan Sontag

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism. — Susan Sontag

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more. — Susan Sontag

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. — Susan Sontag

Literature usually begets literature. — Susan Sontag

When the right person does the wrong thing, it's the right thing. — Susan Sontag

What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it? — Sontag, Susan

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded. — Susan Sontag

One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith ... — Susan Sontag

When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures. — Susan Sontag

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. — Susan Sontag

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world. — Susan Sontag

Shouting has never made me understand anything. — Susan Sontag

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others. — Susan Sontag

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. — Susan Sontag

The function of writing is to explode one's subject - transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations). — Susan Sontag

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are. — Susan Sontag

My loyalty to the past - my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most. — Susan Sontag

There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position. — Susan Sontag

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals. — Susan Sontag

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness. — Susan Sontag

If one could amputate part of one's consciousness ... — Susan Sontag

It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices. — Susan Sontag

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense. — Susan Sontag

I got through my childhood in a delirium of literary exaltations. — Susan Sontag

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work. — Susan Sontag

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that. — Susan Sontag

Whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars. — Susan Sontag

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same. — Susan Sontag

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all. — Susan Sontag

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. — Susan Sontag

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature. — Susan Sontag

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. — Susan Sontag

Perversity is the muse of modern literature. — Susan Sontag

A crisis of self-respect. What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work. I'm being wasted by self-pity and self-contempt. — Susan Sontag

My library is an archive of longings. — Susan Sontag

The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful — Susan Sontag

Try not to live in a linguistic slum. — Susan Sontag

The process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself. — Susan Sontag

Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not "Apocalypse Now" but "Apocalypse From Now On. — Susan Sontag

All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable. — Susan Sontag