Susan Sontag Quotes

329 Sourced Quotes

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

Susan Sontag
It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

Susan Sontag
Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.

Susan Sontag
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato's Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.

Susan Sontag
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.

Susan Sontag
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

Susan Sontag
A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way.

Susan Sontag
If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

Susan Sontag
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

Susan Sontag
The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.

Susan Sontag
Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself - so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.

Susan Sontag
The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

Susan Sontag
Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.

Susan Sontag
Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

Susan Sontag
Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.

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

Susan Sontag
The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

Susan Sontag
In 'life,' I don't want to be reduced to my work. In 'work,' I don't want to be reduced to my life.

Susan Sontag
Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

Susan Sontag
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.

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

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

Susan Sontag
Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.

Susan Sontag
To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.

Susan Sontag
Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

Susan Sontag
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past-are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic
feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

Susan Sontag
As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.

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

Susan Sontag
Writing is an activity that in my experience doesn't get easier with practice. On the contrary.

Susan Sontag