Susan Sontag Quotes

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.

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

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

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.

False values begin with the worship of things.

Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.

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

People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.

It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

Desire has no history.

[On marriage:] It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.

Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.

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

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

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

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

To travel is to shop.

I want to save my soul, that timid wind.

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

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.

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

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

Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.

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

Everything has changed and nothing is changed.

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

All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.

The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute

Courage is morally neutral.

There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.

... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.

I certainly identify myself as a feminist.

I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.

You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even.

I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay.

Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).