Susan Sontag Quotes
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101. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

102. “The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.”

— Susan Sontag

103. “The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.”

— Susan Sontag

104. “Rules of taste enforce structures of power.”

— Susan Sontag

105. “One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”

— Susan Sontag

106. “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

— Susan Sontag

107. “Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”

— Susan Sontag

108. “It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”

— Susan Sontag

109. “Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”

— Susan Sontag

110. “Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.”

— Susan Sontag

111. “Communism is fascism with a human face.”

— Susan Sontag

112. “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted – made cynical, superficial – by this understanding.”

— Susan Sontag

113. “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.”

— Susan Sontag

114. “To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”

— Susan Sontag

115. “It’s hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.”

— Susan Sontag

116. “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”

— Susan Sontag

117. “Art is seduction, not rape.”

— Susan Sontag

118. “In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.”

— Susan Sontag

119. “The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”

— Susan Sontag

120. “I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ’intelligence.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

122. “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”

— Susan Sontag

123. “When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

125. “I don’t consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.”

— Susan Sontag

126. “America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.”

— Susan Sontag

127. “The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.”

— Susan Sontag

128. “Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.”

— Susan Sontag

129. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

130. “The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.”

— Susan Sontag

131. “I guess I think I’m writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I’ll be doing something that’s worth their time. I’d be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.”

— Susan Sontag

132. “Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.”

— Susan Sontag

133. “Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.”

— Susan Sontag

134. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

135. “Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.”

— Susan Sontag

136. “Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.”

— Susan Sontag

137. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

138. “Try not to live in a linguistic slum.”

— Susan Sontag

139. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

140. “Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

142. “The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.”

— Susan Sontag

143. “I love to read the way people love to watch television.”

— Susan Sontag

144. “One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.”

— Susan Sontag

145. “Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Reading Quotes

146. “My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.”

— Susan Sontag

147. “Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”

— Susan Sontag

148. “If I thought that what I’m doing when I write is expressing myself, I’d junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.”

— Susan Sontag

149. “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”

— Susan Sontag

150. “The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.”

— Susan Sontag