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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 13

All Quotes Age Aids Anxiety Art Awareness Beauty Cancer Change Character Comedy Communism Community Consciousness Country Criticism Culture Death Desire Destiny Detachment Dying Energy Evidence Exercise Failing Feelings Funny Giving Health Heart History Identity Illness Imagination Inspiration Inspirational Journey Joy Judgment Language Life Literature Love Lust Lying Memories Metaphor Morality Nature Pain Painting Passion Past Perfection Photography Pleasure Pollution Purpose Quality Reading Reality Revenge Risk Sexuality Silence Style Suffering Surrealism Today Tradition Tragedy Transformation Travel Understanding Values Violence Waiting War Writing

Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously

Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.

Perfection, Looks, Magazines

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol - is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

Discovery, Idols, Lust

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.330, Macmillan

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Art, Mean, Criticism

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.

People, Cynical, Failing

Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.17, Univ of California Press

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.

Photography, Real, Events

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

Barbarians, Persons

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.92, Macmillan

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

Education, Silly, Book

Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.

Cancer, Pregnancy, Demonic

Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

Believe, Health, Reality

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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.

Self, Edification, Actors

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.217, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Photography, Travel, Experience

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.11, Macmillan

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.

Lying, Reality, America

Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

Art is seduction, not rape.

Art, Seduction, Art Is

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

Long, Important, United States

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.256, Macmillan

The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

Serious, Relation, Camps

It's so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way - but not wholly) relieve it. I must never forget it... I want sensuality and sensitivity, both... Let me never deny that... I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments.

Loneliness, Violence, Sides

Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

Two, Long, Shadow

Susan Sontag (2014). “On Photography”, p.105, Penguin UK

She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.

Morning, Lying, Sleep

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.171, Macmillan

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.

Art, Tasks, Culture

Susan Sontag, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003). “Susan Sontag: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung”

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!

Pain, Giving, Perfect

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.8, Macmillan

Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.

Religious, Talking, Imagination

"Styles of Radical Will" by Susan Sontag, (p. 69), 1966.

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Art, Past, Would Be

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

Lust, Path, Obstacles

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.33, Macmillan

The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.

Writing, Trying, Stories

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.409, Macmillan

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.

Spiritual, Art, Player

"Styles of Radical Will" by Susan Sontag, (p. 45), 1966.

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