Susan Sontag quotes - page 3

Susan Sontag was an influential American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, and political activist. Her essays on culture, art, and politics challenged traditional ideas and provoked intense debate. She became an icon of intellectual engagement and cultural criticism. Here are 258 of her quotes:

To photograph is to confer importance. (Susan Sontag)
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. View quote
Susan Sontag
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. View quote
Susan Sontag
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones. View quote
Susan Sontag
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. View quote
Susan Sontag
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. View quote
Susan Sontag
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? View quote
Susan Sontag
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. View quote
Susan Sontag
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds. View quote
Susan Sontag
The writer is either a practising recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one or both. Usually both. View quote
Susan Sontag
Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex. (Susan Sontag)
I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. View quote
Susan Sontag
For Peace. Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war? View quote
Susan Sontag
In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs. View quote
Susan Sontag
I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. View quote
Susan Sontag
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that. View quote
Susan Sontag
Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations. View quote
Susan Sontag
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. View quote
Susan Sontag
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. View quote
Susan Sontag
The sublimity of color in Hodgkin's pictures can be thought of as, first of all, expressive of gratitude - for the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents. View quote
Susan Sontag
Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die. A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place. Wars, genocides - that happened here once, but no longer. It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not "really" Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all. (Susan Sontag)
And isn't it usually so, that lovers who share their daily lives with each other gradually find they need to put very little into words? View quote
Susan Sontag
It depends on me, whether I'm happy within myself. View quote
Susan Sontag
According to an old rule of psychic contagion: that absence of clarity or outright confusion in one, just one specific, local matter will end by infecting the whole of one's judgment. View quote
Susan Sontag
To love one's work is a way of loving oneself, and leaves one freer to love other people. But beware the difference between loving one's work and being merely engrossed in it. View quote
Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

Occupation: American Writer
Born: January 16, 1933
Died: December 28, 2004
Quotes count: 258
Wikipedia: Susan Sontag

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