Susan Sontag Quotes

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

Passion paralyzes good taste.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

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

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous

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.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

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

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

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

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

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

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.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

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

Photographers are always imposing

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.

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.

Everything has changed and nothing is changed.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

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

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.

The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

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

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

Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.

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

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us.