Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.”

— Susan Sontag

203. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

207. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “Desire has no history...”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

215. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

217. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

223. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

225. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

228. “It is passivity that dulls feeling.”

— Susan Sontag

229. “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

230. “God, living is enormous!”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “False values begin with the worship of things.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

239. “Perversity is the muse of modern literature.”

— Susan Sontag

240. “Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.”

— Susan Sontag

241. “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

242. “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

243. “Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.”

— Susan Sontag

244. “The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.”

— Susan Sontag

245. “Ideas disturb the levelness of life.”

— Susan Sontag

246. “Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.”

— Susan Sontag

247. “Passion paralyzes good taste.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

249. “There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.”

— Susan Sontag

250. “In the United States it’s not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.”

— Susan Sontag