Susan Sontag Quotes

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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Susan Sontag
Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

Susan Sontag
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Susan Sontag
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images.

Susan Sontag
Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.

Susan Sontag
For Cioran the aphoristic style is less a principle of reality than a principle of knowing: that it's the destiny of every profound idea to be quickly checkmated by another idea, which it itself has implicitly generated.

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

Susan Sontag
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Susan Sontag
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

Susan Sontag
Art is the most general condition of the Past in the present.... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction — except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Susan Sontag
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

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

Susan Sontag
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

Susan Sontag
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Susan Sontag
The sublimity of color in Hodgkin's pictures can be thought of as, first of all, expressive of gratitude — for the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents.

Susan Sontag
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended.... Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.

Susan Sontag
Modernist tasks and liberties have stirred up a canny diffidence among painters of the largest accomplishment when pressed to talk about their art. It appears unseemly, or naive, to have much to say about the pictures or to attach to them any explicit "program." No more theories expounding an ideal way of painting. And, as statements wither and with them counter-statements, hardly anything in the way of provocation either. Decorum suggests that artists sound somewhat trapped when being drawn out, and venturing a few cagey glimpses of intention.

Susan Sontag
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

Susan Sontag
I'll take the American empire any day over the empire of what my pal Chris Hitchens calls "Islamic fascism." I'm not against fighting this enemy — it is an enemy and I'm not a pacifist.
I think what happened on Sept. 11 was an appalling crime, and I'm astonished that I even have to say that, to reassure people that I feel that way. But I do feel that the Gulf War revisited is not the way to fight this enemy.

Susan Sontag
In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe.

Susan Sontag
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource with which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

Susan Sontag
A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue — my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol — is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

Susan Sontag
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

Susan Sontag
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Susan Sontag
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Susan Sontag
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.

Susan Sontag
Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example — for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.

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

Susan Sontag
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.'

Susan Sontag
The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Susan Sontag