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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 19

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

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Photography, World, Heroic

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.29, Macmillan

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.

Art, Criticism, Dubious

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

Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

Mass Culture, Age, Matter

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

It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.

Writing, Lakes, Decision

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

Style, Vision, World

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

Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

Travel, Fun, Vacation

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

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods.

Art, Mean, Self

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. 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.

Art, Real, Cutting

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

Forever, Details, Life Is

Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.

Learning, Mean, One Day

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Lying, Simple, Self

Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous

Love Is, Fire

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.

Couple, Hunting, Tacit

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.190, Macmillan

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

Writing, Heart, Stories

Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.407, Macmillan

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

Idols, Morality, Consciousness

We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

Views, Intelligence, Culture

Salmagundi, No. 31-32, (p. 29), 1975.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

Photography, Ongoing, Pieces

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

A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.

Personality, Needs, Half

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

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.

Photography, Feelings, Cameras

Susan Sontag (1978). “On photography”, Delta

Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.

Names, Justice, Acting

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.184, Macmillan

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Country, Giving Up, Past

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

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.

Photography, Majesty, Dwarfs

"On Photography".

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

History, Fiction, Crowds

Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.92, Macmillan

To travel is to shop.

Shopping, Shops

Susan Sontag (1992). “The Volcano Lover”

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

Writing, Great Writers, Stills

Susan Sontag (2008). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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