Susan Sontag Quotes

It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

It's almost as if this is the fundamental procedure in modern society: duplication and recycling.

Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

I love to read the way people love to watch television.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets.

That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.

I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

The really important thing is not to reject anything.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way.

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Love dies because its birth was an error.

Taste has no system and no proofs.

The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.

To the militant, identity is everything.

...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.