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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 15

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

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

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

Love, Strong, Passion

Christine Allison, Susan Sontag (1978). “The benefactor: a novel”, Delta

False values begin with the worship of things.

Worship, Values

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.94, Macmillan

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

Political, Arbitrary, Definitions

Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.55, Univ of California Press

Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

Psychics, Fiction, Literature

One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.

People, May, Energy

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.

Life, Moving, Able

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

Poet, Units, Prose

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.566, Macmillan

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.

Religious, Views, Speaks French

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.

Art, Real, Mean

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

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Taken, Population, Awareness

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

Exercise, Tragedy, Analysis

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

Photography, People, Chinese

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.99, Macmillan

The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.

Sex, Pleasure, Form

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

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

Photography, Ethics, Grammar

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.5, Macmillan

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

Photography, Thinking, People

All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.

Struggle, Community, Resistance

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.244, Macmillan

Desire has no history.

Desire

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.18, Macmillan

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Photography, Travel, Home

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

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

Hero, Culture, Ants

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Photography, Art, Lying

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.130, Macmillan

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

Powerful, Years, Able

Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.

Stupid, Wheels, Breaking Down

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.176, Macmillan

Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.

Reading, Book, Waiting

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

Treasure, Patient, Regard

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.

Art, Social, Force

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