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Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 9

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

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

Writing, Tasks, Slavery

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Art, Writing, Feelings

I want to save my soul, that timid wind.

Wind, Soul, Want

Susan Sontag (2017). “Stories: Collected Stories”, p.230, Penguin UK

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

Writing, Elements, Alive

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

Passion, Past, Photographer

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.70, Macmillan

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Art, Revenge, Women

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.

Museums, Grandparent, Essentials

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.62, Macmillan

In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.

Beautiful, Rivers, Smell

Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.209, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Beauty, Time, Past

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.69, Macmillan

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

Writing, Agony, Passionate

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

Photography, Art, Twilight

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

Suffering, Doe, Compassionate

Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.21, Macmillan

The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

Ethical Issues, Mass Culture, Minorities

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

Work, Ambition, Doe

1963 The Benefactor, ch.1. = = = = =

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

Sex, Mind, Atheism

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

Health, Night, Sick

Illness as Metaphor preface (1978)

...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.

Writing, Because I Can, Smarter

writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

Literature, Makers, Myth

Susan Sontag's Speech upon being awarded the "Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels" (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, www.tomdispatch.com. October 12, 2003.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

War, Rip, Tears

Susan Sontag (2013). “Regarding the Pain of Others”, p.8, Macmillan

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

Nuts, People, Four

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

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

Peace, War, Eye

"Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors".

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

Taste, Structure, Aesthetic

The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Lying, Opposites, Ideas

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

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

Art, Kind, Modern

Source: ctheory.net

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

Imagination, Structure, Pornography

Susan Sontag (2014). “A Susan Sontag Reader”, p.313, Macmillan

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