Susan Sontag – 22 Quotes

22 Quotes by Susan Sontag

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

– Susan Sontag

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

– Susan Sontag

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects – making it possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

– Susan Sontag

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

– Susan Sontag

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

– Susan Sontag

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

– Susan Sontag

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

– Susan Sontag

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

– Susan Sontag

A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

– Susan Sontag

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

– Susan Sontag

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

– Susan Sontag

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

– Susan Sontag

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

– Susan Sontag

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

– Susan Sontag

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

– Susan Sontag

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

– Susan Sontag

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

– Susan Sontag

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

– Susan Sontag

To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

– Susan Sontag

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

– Susan Sontag

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

– Susan Sontag

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

– Susan Sontag