Susan Sontag Quotes

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ...

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women...

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really hum...

Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it....

Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Readin...

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a pass...

I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's so...

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe...

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious ...

The only interesting ideas are heresies

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

I am scared, numbed from the marital wars - that deadly, deadening combat which is the opposite, the...

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wis...

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles ...

One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel...

What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-re...

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - li...

We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't u...

It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links ...

To the militant, identity is everything.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell w...

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The questio...

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act,...

There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can thi...

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography...

Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one ca...

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more.

Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functi...

With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.

Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l...

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the...

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow t...

The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies arou...

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled re...

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o...

How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!

Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the cal...

Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri...

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past...

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub...

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 20...

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thi...

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

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel...

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding -...

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo...

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are thos...

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

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past...

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec...

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both big...

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing...

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured m...

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine wo...

Writing is a mysterious activity.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … ...

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades no...

I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine wo...

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchange...

Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing – which ...

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication

Instead of just recording reality photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us ...

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

Life is not about significant details illuminated in a flash fixed forever. Photographs are.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, a...

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people t...

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear endearing touching preciou...

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemu...

We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not...

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ...

It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read...