Susan Sontag Quotes

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

I'm more cautious about what I write.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

I have been told that I am a "natural" feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

The only interesting ideas are heresies

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

My library is an archive of longings.

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.

whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

A good book is an education of the heart.

You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.

I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names. Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.