Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.”

— Susan Sontag

103. “The problem isn’t that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs.”

— Susan Sontag

104. “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

105. “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

106. “It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph – only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

108. “Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”

— Susan Sontag

109. “Regenerative experiences: Plunge into the sea. The sun. An old city. Silence.”

— Susan Sontag

110. “Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.”

— Susan Sontag

111. “I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

116. “The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.”

— Susan Sontag

117. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

120. “Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been – what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal – needs to be protected from people.”

— Susan Sontag

121. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

123. “Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

125. “Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

128. “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

129. “To travel is to shop.”

— Susan Sontag

130. “The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one – or both. Usually both.”

— Susan Sontag

131. “The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

133. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

135. “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

136. “Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

— Susan Sontag

137. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

138. “I am tired. I would like to be a mountain, a tree, a stone.”

— Susan Sontag

139. “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”

— Susan Sontag

140. “Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.”

— Susan Sontag

141. “But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.”

— Susan Sontag

142. “A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.”

— Susan Sontag

143. “The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

146. “The most refined form of sexual attractiveness – as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure – consists in going against the grain of one’s sex.”

— Susan Sontag

147. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

148. “What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death.”

— Susan Sontag

149. “I’ve become passive. I don’t invent, I don’t yearn. I manage, I cope.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag