Quotes by Sontag, Susan

"Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments."

Sontag, Susan on quotations   

"I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future."

Sontag, Susan on racism   

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

Sontag, Susan on religion   

"Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art."

Sontag, Susan on science   

"Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone."

Sontag, Susan on sex   

"Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives."

Sontag, Susan on sex   

"One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits."

Sontag, Susan on society   

"In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation."

Sontag, Susan on style   

"It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades."

Sontag, Susan on suffering   

"What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."

Sontag, Susan on beauty   

"Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other."

Sontag, Susan on bores and boredom
3 fans of this quote   

"Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene -- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses."

Sontag, Susan on cancer   

"The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion of possibility."

Sontag, Susan on capitalism   

"Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe."

Sontag, Susan on change   

"The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion."

Sontag, Susan on taste   

"Taste has no system and no proofs."

Sontag, Susan on taste   

"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."

Sontag, Susan on taste   

"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."

Sontag, Susan on things and little things
6 fans of this quote   

"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."

Sontag, Susan on travel   

"The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie."

Sontag, Susan on truth   

"Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt."

Sontag, Susan on victims   

"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."

Sontag, Susan on war   

"The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both."

Sontag, Susan on writers and writing   

"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."

Sontag, Susan on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret."

Sontag, Susan on cinema   

"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."

Sontag, Susan on criticism   

"In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable."

Sontag, Susan on criticism   

"Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility."

Sontag, Susan on criticism