Susan Sontag Quotes

329 Sourced Quotes

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.

Susan Sontag
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.

Susan Sontag
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

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

Susan Sontag
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

Susan Sontag
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

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
The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.

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

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

Susan Sontag
Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

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

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

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
I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.

Susan Sontag
Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.

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

Susan Sontag
Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.

Susan Sontag
Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

Susan Sontag
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

Susan Sontag
The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.

Susan Sontag
Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.

Susan Sontag
Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag
Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Susan Sontag
The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.

Susan Sontag
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.

Susan Sontag