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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 18

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

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.

Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.

Art, Taken, Too Much

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.169, Macmillan

Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.

Justice, Diversity, Important

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

Use

And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.

Mean, Laughing, Perfection

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.154, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.

Art, Issues, Political

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

Photography, Photograph, Ugliness

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.76, Macmillan

To us, the difference between the #‎ photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from #‎ photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle.

Photography, Art, Mean

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.152, Macmillan

Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

School, Assessment, Judging

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.135, Macmillan

To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.

Reading, Frustration, World

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.

Reality, Wings, Erotic

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

Insecure, Past, Space

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.10, Macmillan

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

Death, Sex, Pornography

"The Pornographic Imagination" (1967)

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

Comedy, Failing, Leaks

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

Persons, Journal, Keeping A Journal

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.322, Macmillan

It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.

Powerful, Thinking, Finals

Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag (1983). “Barthes: Selected Writings”

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

Dumb, World, Feels

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.177, Macmillan

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

Intellectual, Exotic, Urban

Courage is morally neutral.

"The 'Traitor' Fires Back". Interview with David Talbot, www.salon.com. October 17, 2001.

Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.

Real, Book, Ideas

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

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

Lying, Mean, Self

In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

Photography, Vocabulary, Language

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.20, Macmillan

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Art, Revenge, Sensual

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.149, Macmillan

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

Photograph, Shock, Novel

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.20, Macmillan

The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.

Memories, Museums, Visuals

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.128, Macmillan

Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.

Helping, Photograph, Doubtful

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