Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.”

— Susan Sontag

302. “The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.”

— Susan Sontag

303. “Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it – say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken – or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”

— Susan Sontag

304. “The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.”

— Susan Sontag

305. “Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate – and, therefore, improve – our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.”

— Susan Sontag

306. “The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.”

— Susan Sontag

307. “Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.”

— Susan Sontag

308. “I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.”

— Susan Sontag

309. “Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.”

— Susan Sontag

310. “On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.”

— Susan Sontag

311. “Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it’s the whole society.”

— Susan Sontag

312. “The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.”

— Susan Sontag

313. “The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation – however minute.”

— Susan Sontag

314. “One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.”

— Susan Sontag

315. “Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.”

— Susan Sontag

316. “A great writer has all 4 – but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.”

— Susan Sontag

317. “An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.”

— Susan Sontag

318. “Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies.”

— Susan Sontag

319. “Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy – it’s the most repulsive thing in the world. One’s got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.”

— Susan Sontag

320. “The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.”

— Susan Sontag

321. “The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.”

— Susan Sontag

322. “Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.”

— Susan Sontag

323. “My ignorance is not charming.”

— Susan Sontag

324. “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.”

— Susan Sontag

325. “Shouting has never made me understand anything.”

— Susan Sontag

326. “The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.”

— Susan Sontag

327. “Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life – its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness – conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”

— Susan Sontag

328. “Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.”

— Susan Sontag

329. “Look, what I want is to be fully present in my life – to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself in your life, giving full attention to the world, which includes you. You are not the world, the world is not identical to you, but you’re in it and paying attention to it. That’s what a writer does – a writer pays attention to the world.”

— Susan Sontag

330. “What do I enjoy? Music, being in love, children, sleeping, meat.”

— Susan Sontag

331. “The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.”

— Susan Sontag

332. “The really important thing is not to reject anything.”

— Susan Sontag

333. “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

334. “What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.”

— Susan Sontag

335. “The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.”

— Susan Sontag

336. “Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.”

— Susan Sontag

337. “Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.”

— Susan Sontag

338. “Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize.”

— Susan Sontag

339. “There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.”

— Susan Sontag

340. “The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.”

— Susan Sontag

341. “Most of my reading is rereading.”

— Susan Sontag

342. “We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.”

— Susan Sontag

343. “If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.”

— Susan Sontag

344. “Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.”

— Susan Sontag

345. “Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.”

— Susan Sontag

346. “A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.”

— Susan Sontag

347. “Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay.”

— Susan Sontag

348. “Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.”

— Susan Sontag

349. “One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.”

— Susan Sontag

350. “The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.”

— Susan Sontag