Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

355. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

371. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

379. “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman.” To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

382. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

384. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

386. “Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory – part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction... 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

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

— Susan Sontag

388. “What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such – of what lies beyond the human and the made – and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense of the sheer spread and fullness of reality, inanimate as well as pulsing, that surrounds us all.”

— Susan Sontag

389. “Courage is morally neutral.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

392. “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

393. “Elites presuppose masses.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

400. “I have always been full of lust – as I am now – but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.”

— Susan Sontag