Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

107. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

109. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

113. “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

114. “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.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

119. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

128. “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

129. “To travel is to shop.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

131. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

135. “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

136. “Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character.”

— Susan Sontag

137. “Every style is a means of insisting on something.”

— Susan Sontag

138. “Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves – how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one “role” to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I’m supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it’s successfully executed.”

— Susan Sontag

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

143. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

145. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

148. “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

149. “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

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

— Susan Sontag