Susan Sontag Quotes

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

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.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words.

Literature usually begets literature.

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

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact "importing", I stopped doing it.

Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.

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

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

To travel is to shop.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.

That tendency of social thought to generalize, to describe a leading tendency in a society in such a way that it seems that everything falls within its iron laws, is very common. Of course our own experience tells us that life is not as monochrome as these thinkers depict it. On the other hand they are very valuable because they alert us to transformations we are likely to take for granted.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.