Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “We are told we must choose – the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

155. “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

156. “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

157. “Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.”

— Susan Sontag

158. “Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.”

— Susan Sontag

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

164. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

167. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

173. “Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.”

— Susan Sontag

174. “In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary – are, in the largest sense, political.”

— Susan Sontag

175. “By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.”

— Susan Sontag

176. “Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It’s rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.”

— Susan Sontag

177. “Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is “sexier” than communism.”

— Susan Sontag

178. “Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.”

— Susan Sontag

179. “War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.”

— Susan Sontag

180. “War has been the norm and peace the exception.”

— Susan Sontag

181. “Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.”

— Susan Sontag

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182. “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ’too much.”

— Susan Sontag

183. “Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon – one that’s as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology.”

— Susan Sontag

184. “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.”

— Susan Sontag

185. “Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.”

— Susan Sontag

186. “War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.”

— Susan Sontag

187. “Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.”

— Susan Sontag

188. “In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.”

— Susan Sontag

189. “As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.”

— Susan Sontag

190. “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”

— Susan Sontag

191. “It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation – a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.”

— Susan Sontag

192. “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.”

— Susan Sontag

193. “Pornography is one of the branches of literature – science fiction is another – aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.”

— Susan Sontag

194. “All memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”

— Susan Sontag

195. “If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.”

— Susan Sontag

196. “Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

— Susan Sontag

197. “The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.”

— Susan Sontag

198. “My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not ’language.”

— Susan Sontag

199. “To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response.”

— Susan Sontag

200. “The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.”

— Susan Sontag