Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies.”

— Susan Sontag

352. “Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

355. “AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.”

— Susan Sontag

356. “My loyalty to the past – my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

360. “Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.”

— Susan Sontag

361. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

364. “There are some elements in life – above all, sexual pleasure – about which it isn’t necessary to have a position.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

367. “Experiences aren’t pornographic; only images and representations – structures of the imagination – are.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

369. “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.”

— Susan Sontag

370. “It’s beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.”

— Susan Sontag

371. “Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism.”

— Susan Sontag

372. “If one could amputate part of one’s consciousness...”

— Susan Sontag

373. “My repressed feelings leak out – slowly – in the form of resentment – a continual leakage of resentment.”

— Susan Sontag

374. “The “happening” operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.”

— Susan Sontag

375. “Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn.”

— Susan Sontag

376. “All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.”

— Susan Sontag

377. “Courage is morally neutral.”

— Susan Sontag

378. “The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.”

— Susan Sontag

379. “Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.”

— Susan Sontag

380. “The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.”

— Susan Sontag

381. “A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.”

— Susan Sontag

382. “Elites presuppose masses.”

— Susan Sontag

383. “The early Romantic sought superiority by desiring, and by desiring to desire, more intensely than others do.”

— Susan Sontag

384. “He looked into the hole, and like any hole it said, Jump.”

— Susan Sontag

385. “A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.”

— Susan Sontag

386. “Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.”

— Susan Sontag

387. “A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.”

— Susan Sontag

388. “In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding – at a distance, through the medium of photography – other people’s pain.”

— Susan Sontag

389. “Beware of anything that you hear yourself saying often.”

— Susan Sontag

390. “People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.”

— Susan Sontag

391. “It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.”

— Susan Sontag

392. “I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.”

— Susan Sontag

393. “You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.”

— Susan Sontag

394. “Why wouldn’t you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It’s far more interesting to write about others.”

— Susan Sontag

395. “The only ideals allowed are healthy ones – those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.”

— Susan Sontag

396. “Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists.”

— Susan Sontag

397. “The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction – as if one were obliged to choose between them...”

— Susan Sontag

398. “Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. 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

399. “Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.”

— Susan Sontag

400. “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”

— Susan Sontag