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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 17

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

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Vision, Tragedy, Nihilism

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

Voice, Today, Weak

Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.

Death, Dying, Unbearable

Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.

Beautiful, Training, Orbit

I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets.

Stupid, Long, Stupidity

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

Success, Writing, Mean

But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.

Forgiving, Care, Culture

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

Two, Minorities, Moral

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

Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

Body, Compare, Inevitable

As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Photography, Art, Self

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.9, Macmillan

The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.

Air, Breathing, Body

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

Art, Self, People

Susan Sontag (2013). “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, p.150, Penguin UK

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

Reality, Cameras, Seems

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.500, Macmillan

A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way.

Men, Doe, Body

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.

Ambition, Artist, Mediocrity

Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.

Morality, Sponsors, Moral Indignation

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.177, Macmillan

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. Cancerphobia taught us the fear of a polluting environment; now we have the fear of polluting people that AIDS anxiety inevitably communicates. Fear of the Communion cup, fear of surgery: fear of contaminated blood, whether Christ's blood or your neighbor's.

Taught Us, Blood, People

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

Cancer, Moving, Passion

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

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

Spiritual, Insanity, Feelings

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

Literature usually begets literature.

Literature, Begets

Susan Sontag (2013). “Against Interpretation and Other Essays”, p.72, Penguin UK

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

Worst Case Scenario, Needs, Taste

In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art , Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community.

Spiritual, Art, Perfection

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

I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.

Writing, Thinking, People

"The risk taker". Interview with Gary Younge, www.theguardian.com. January 19, 2002.

The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.

Cutting, Ideas, Creative

It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Feelings, Passivity

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.102, Macmillan

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