Susan Sontag Quotes

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

~ Susan Sontag

It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

~ Susan Sontag

No such thing as a temptation. A temptation is a desire, a lust like any other - but one that we regret afterwards + wish undone (or that we know beforehand we will regret after). So it`s no excuse to say, ``I didn`t mean to do it. I was tempted + I couldn`t resist.`` All one can honestly say is, ``I did it. I`m sorry I did it.``- Reborn

~ Susan Sontag

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

~ Susan Sontag

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

~ Susan Sontag

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.

~ Susan Sontag

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

~ Susan Sontag

I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

~ Susan Sontag

I’m now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of ‘real’ aggressivity. I’m sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world.

~ Susan Sontag

All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.

~ Susan Sontag

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, 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.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

~ Susan Sontag

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

~ Susan Sontag

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.

~ Susan Sontag

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

~ Susan Sontag

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.

~ Susan Sontag

Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

~ Susan Sontag

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

~ Susan Sontag

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

~ Susan Sontag

Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.Photographs are.

~ Susan Sontag

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

~ 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

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.

~ 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 eroticfeelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

~ Susan Sontag

The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. 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. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

~ Susan Sontag

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

~ Susan Sontag

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

~ Susan Sontag

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly.

~ Susan Sontag

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the French pox to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.

~ Susan Sontag

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.

~ Susan Sontag

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

~ Susan Sontag

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

~ Susan Sontag

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

~ Susan Sontag

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

~ Susan Sontag

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

~ Susan Sontag

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

~ Susan Sontag

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

~ 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

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

~ 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

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

~ Susan Sontag