Top 450 Susan Sontag Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

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

— Susan Sontag

402. “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

403. “Being self-conscious. Treating one’s self as an other. Supervising oneself.”

— Susan Sontag

404. “Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

406. “In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.”

— Susan Sontag

407. “What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -.”

— Susan Sontag

408. “Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed – that is the modern view.”

— Susan Sontag

409. “Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can’t force it.”

— Susan Sontag

410. “Image of an image of an image... But to record all the dips and upswings, in a sense falsifies them, and I start deluding myself and thinking all this is, or might be, real. Enough to play the game, or try to play it. A mistake to tally up the score.”

— Susan Sontag

411. “Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.”

— Susan Sontag

412. “In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality – no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.”

— Susan Sontag

413. “One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.”

— Susan Sontag

414. “I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of a greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.”

— Susan Sontag

415. “I am sick of having opinions. I am sick of talking.”

— Susan Sontag

416. “No one extraordinary appears to be entirely contemporary. People who are contemporary don’t appear at all: they are invisible.”

— Susan Sontag

417. “She increases her burden of self-hatred, she behaves destructively with people she loves.”

— Susan Sontag

418. “The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.”

— Susan Sontag

419. “We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”

— Susan Sontag

420. “The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.”

— Susan Sontag

421. “You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.”

— Susan Sontag

422. “A six-week trip to China in 1973 convinced me – if I needed convincing – that the autonomy of the aesthetic is something to be protected, and cherished, as indispensable nourishment to intelligence. But a decade-long residence in the 1960s, with its inexorable conversion of moral and political radicalisms into “style,” has convinced me of the perils of over- generalizing the aesthetic view of the world.”

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

424. “Literature usually begets literature.”

— Susan Sontag

425. “One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.”

— Susan Sontag

426. “Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That’s how they’re able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.”

— Susan Sontag

427. “Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness.”

— Susan Sontag

428. “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

429. “To describe a phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence. The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and justifies “severe” measures.”

— Susan Sontag

430. “A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot – whatever the artist’s personal intention – advocate anything at all.”

— Susan Sontag

431. “There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.”

— Susan Sontag

432. “Pleasure of tragedy is vicarious suicide.”

— Susan Sontag

433. “Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.”

— Susan Sontag

434. “Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.”

— Susan Sontag

435. “There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.”

— Susan Sontag

436. “In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.”

— Susan Sontag

437. “Did I feel all that? So much? As sounds decays into inadudibility, euphoria decays into indifference, and that is always unexpected, the way exalted feelings are weakened, undone by time.”

— Susan Sontag

438. “All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable – that is, unforgettable.”

— Susan Sontag

439. “But the past is the biggest country of all, and there’s a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that’s an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live.”

— Susan Sontag

440. “Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, ‘Alice, Alice, what is the answer?’ Her companion replied, ‘There is no answer.’ Gertrude Stein continued, ‘Well, then, what is the question?’ and fell back dead.”

— Susan Sontag

441. “Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not “Apocalypse Now” but “Apocalypse From Now On.”

— Susan Sontag

442. “It’s not a love of the old as such. It’s simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment – or arouses a necessary sympathy.”

— Susan Sontag

443. “Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.”

— Susan Sontag

444. “One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.”

— Susan Sontag

445. “Volume depends precisely on the writer’s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.”

— Susan Sontag

446. “With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind – like most historical evidence.”

— Susan Sontag

447. “However painful they were, I needed my dreams – the metaphor for my introspection – if I was ever to be at peace.”

— Susan Sontag

448. “Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”

— Susan Sontag

449. “A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short.”

— Susan Sontag

450. “When the right person does the wrong thing, it’s the right thing.”

— Susan Sontag