Susan Sontag Quotes

To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.

Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

I certainly identify myself as a feminist.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute

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.

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

Most of my reading is rereading.

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.

My ignorance is not charming.

Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.

Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling.

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

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

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.

I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.

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

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

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.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.