Susan Sontag Quotes

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.

You can always be quoted.

It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.

Using quotations was at first quite spontaneous for me, but then this use became strengthened through reflection. But originally this practice came out of temperament.

I'm more cautious about what I write.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.

I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.

The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.

I think that there is generally less of a community and that the fragmentation of the left is a symptom. I think that it is less and less possible to take for granted certain cultural references.

Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.

That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.

You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.

We are ruled by quotations.

[Brodsky] loved cats, and sometimes for a greeting would meow.

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

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)

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

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

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

To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.

The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.

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

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

I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.

Alone, alone. I am alone – I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, I’m here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT.

With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.

We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices.

There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.

How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w

If one could amputate part of one's consciousness...

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

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.