Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have...”

— Susan Sontag

202. “Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.”

— Susan Sontag

203. “Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.”

— Susan Sontag

204. “When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.”

— Susan Sontag

205. “I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.”

— Susan Sontag

206. “The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

207. “Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.”

— Susan Sontag

208. “Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology...”

— Susan Sontag

209. “To the militant, identity is everything.”

— Susan Sontag

210. “Unfortunately, moral beauty in art – like physical beauty in a person – is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.”

— Susan Sontag

211. “I want to save my soul, that timid wind.”

— Susan Sontag

212. “Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements – land and water, firepower and distancing air.”

— Susan Sontag

213. “In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.”

— Susan Sontag

214. “The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty – of the indefinite expansion of possibility.”

— Susan Sontag

215. “Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it.”

— Susan Sontag

216. “Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.”

— Susan Sontag

217. “The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.”

— Susan Sontag

218. “Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.”

— Susan Sontag

219. “My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.”

— Susan Sontag

220. “Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.”

— Susan Sontag

221. “Desire has no history...”

— Susan Sontag

222. “Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.”

— Susan Sontag

223. “Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.”

— Susan Sontag

224. “In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

— Susan Sontag

225. “I vulgarize my feelings by speaking of them too readily to others.”

— Susan Sontag

226. “What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one’s existence as a sexual being – while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up.”

— Susan Sontag

227. “Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.”

— Susan Sontag

228. “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE, in a letter.”

— Susan Sontag

229. “All struggle, all resistance is – must be – concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.”

— Susan Sontag

230. “Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.”

— Susan Sontag

231. “The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”

— Susan Sontag

232. “Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.”

— Susan Sontag

233. “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”

— Susan Sontag

234. “To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.”

— Susan Sontag

235. “All memory is individual, unreproducible – it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.”

— Susan Sontag

236. “A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way.”

— Susan Sontag

237. “To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader’s own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.”

— Susan Sontag

Featured in: Reading Quotes

238. “All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.”

— Susan Sontag

239. “Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don’t live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.”

— Susan Sontag

240. “The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.”

— Susan Sontag

241. “Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.”

— Susan Sontag

242. “Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”

— Susan Sontag

243. “Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.”

— Susan Sontag

244. “The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure – though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.”

— Susan Sontag

245. “Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.”

— Susan Sontag

246. “Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.”

— Susan Sontag

247. “My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.”

— Susan Sontag

248. “As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.”

— Susan Sontag

249. “Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.”

— Susan Sontag

250. “God, living is enormous!”

— Susan Sontag