Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “How can I describe my life to you? I think a lot, listen to music. I’m fond of flowers.”

— Susan Sontag

52. “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

53. “You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books.”

— Susan Sontag

54. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

55. “A good book is an education of the heart.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

58. “Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”

— Susan Sontag

59. “Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.”

— Susan Sontag

60. “Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.”

— Susan Sontag

61. “Art is seduction, not rape.”

— Susan Sontag

62. “Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.”

— Susan Sontag

63. “A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent – more important than any words.”

— Susan Sontag

64. “Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

66. “Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.”

— Susan Sontag

67. “I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it’s a direct passionate response. But when I write, I’m very uncertain whether it’s good enough. That is, of course, the writer’s agony.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

70. “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.”

— Susan Sontag

71. “I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

73. “Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.”

— Susan Sontag

74. “Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.”

— Susan Sontag

75. “The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”

— Susan Sontag

76. “Unfortunately, moral beauty in art – like physical beauty in a person – is extremely perishable.”

— Susan Sontag

77. “I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall – like seeking love in a whorehouse.”

— Susan Sontag

78. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

80. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

83. “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”

— Susan Sontag

84. “Love is friendship on fire – anonymous.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

87. “I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all.”

— Susan Sontag

88. “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

89. “Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

92. “I write – and talk – in order to find out what I think.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

94. “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

95. “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

96. “I know I’m not myself with people, but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.”

— Susan Sontag

97. “People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

99. “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

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

— Susan Sontag