Susan Sontag Quotes

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

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

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.

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

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

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

All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

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

Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling.

I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

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

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.

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.

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures

What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.

Most of my reading is rereading.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.

We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.