Susan Sontag Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

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

Susan Sontag
He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

Susan Sontag
I write — and talk — in order to find out what I think.

Susan Sontag
There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

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

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

Susan Sontag
The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

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

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

Susan Sontag
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

Susan Sontag
The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

Susan Sontag
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

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

Susan Sontag
One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

Susan Sontag
The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

Susan Sontag
Depression is melancholy minus its charms — the animation, the fits.

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

Susan Sontag
Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself.

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

Susan Sontag
I like to feel dumb. That's how I know there's more in the world than me.

Susan Sontag
I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Susan Sontag
One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

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

Susan Sontag
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

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

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

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

Susan Sontag
Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.

Susan Sontag
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.

Susan Sontag