Susan Sontag Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Susan Sontag on Wise Famous Quotes.
When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.
Time evaporate, money is always needed, comforts found where they were not expected and excitement dug up in barren ground.
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them ...
Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.
The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
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.
Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind's need or capacity for self-estrangement.
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.
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.
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
The process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
The function of writing is to explode one's subject - transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations).
There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation. 4
One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.
A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.