Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.”

— Susan Sontag

52. “Art is seduction, not rape.”

— 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. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

56. “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

57. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

59. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

66. “How can I describe my life to you? I think a lot, listen to music. I’m fond of flowers.”

— Susan Sontag

67. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

75. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

77. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

82. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

91. “Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

95. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

98. “Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”

— Susan Sontag

99. “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

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

— Susan Sontag