Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

107. “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

108. “As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.”

— Susan Sontag

109. “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

110. “Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

111. “All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

113. “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

114. “The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

124. “Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one.”

— Susan Sontag

125. “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

126. “To photograph is to confer importance.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

128. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Susan Sontag

130. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

133. “But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.”

— Susan Sontag

134. “The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.”

— Susan Sontag

135. “To photograph people is to violate them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”

— Susan Sontag

136. “Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.”

— Susan Sontag

137. “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

138. “It is passivity that dulls feeling.”

— Susan Sontag

139. “Creativity needs to be taken care of. It’s like a big baby that needs to be nourished.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

141. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

145. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

148. “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

149. “To travel is to shop.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag