Susan Sontag Quotes (126 Quotes)

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. . .

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals,

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope. . .

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent are seen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways.

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.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

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.

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.

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

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that a lot more money is involved and this is a largely money-oriented society. ... Nevertheless, this is a very good book town, whether it's known to be that or not, and that's why you have something like this.

What we need is to use what we have.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

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. . .

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.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe --though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.

With more people, there are more voices to tune out.

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself.

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

It's fantastic knowing you're going to die it really makes having priorities and trying to follow them very real to you.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

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

Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism...

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

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.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been -- what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal -- needs to be protected from people.

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

To take a 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.

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.

The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way things really are --- and always will be. How things really are --- and always will be --- is neither all-evil nor all-good but deficient, inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite us to clean up our act to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting that secret gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right, and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it.

All. . . 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.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.