Susan Sontag Quotes
I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.
the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.
Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
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.
Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.
I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.
In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.
Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.
The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.
The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.
Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.
The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.
Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.
Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.