Susan Sontag Quotes

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.

With more people, there are more voices to tune out.

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.

Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.

You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even.

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

You can always be quoted.

Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

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.

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

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

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures

What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.

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

Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.

[On marriage:] It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.