Quotes by
Susan Sontag |
1933-2004 , American writer, critic, activist
She was an American writer, filmmaker, intellectual, and political activist best known for her essays on modern culture. Her works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover, and In America. | 45 quotes | 1,198 visits |
Quotations
| • | The most refined form of sexual attractiveness – as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure – consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. 3 |
| • | I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me. 3 |
| • | Aphorisms are rogue ideas. 2 |
| • | What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. 2 |
| • | I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall – like seeking love in a whorehouse. 2 |
| • | I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. 2 |
| • | Art is seduction, not rape. 1 |
| • | Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art. 1 |
| • | I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. 1 |
| • | My library is an archive of longings. 1 |
| • | My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. 1 |
| • | How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion 1 |
| • | Philosophy is an art form — art of thought or thought as art. 1 |
| • | The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own. |
| • | A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of ‘spirit’ over matter. |
| • | Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. |
| • | Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. |
| • | I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it. |
| • | Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. |
| • | The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. |
| • | Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. |
| • | Rules of taste enforce structures of power. |
| • | Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person. |
| • | The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. |
| • | I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. |
| • | In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. |
| • | The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. |
| • | The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is. |
| • | To photograph is to confer importance. |
| • | Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material. |
| • | Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech. |
| • | Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. |
| • | Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. |
| • | Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe. |
| • | It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. |
| • | My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. |
| • | It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin. |
| • | Sanity is a cozy lie. |
| • | Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you. |
| • | I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. |
| • | 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction. |
| • | I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. |
| • | Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same. |
| • | Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer. |
| • | The only interesting ideas are heresies. |
