Susan Sontag Quotes

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Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Susan Sontag
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Susan Sontag
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty – of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

Susan Sontag
In America the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Susan Sontag
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

Susan Sontag
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings'.

Susan Sontag
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

Susan Sontag
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward disaster.

Susan Sontag
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Susan Sontag
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

Susan Sontag
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

Susan Sontag
The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

Susan Sontag
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Susan Sontag
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

Susan Sontag
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Susan Sontag
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured on digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component.

Susan Sontag
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Susan Sontag
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Susan Sontag
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.

Susan Sontag
Pornography is one of the branches of literature — science fiction is another — aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

Susan Sontag
Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes.

Susan Sontag
All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

Susan Sontag
In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

Susan Sontag
I don't care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces 'intelligence.

Susan Sontag
The photographic image eclipses other forms of understanding—and remembering..... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.

Susan Sontag