147 Quotes & Sayings By Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was born in 1933 and studied at New York University and the Sorbonne. She was a member of the French Resistance during World War II and later joined the Communist Party. She wrote for The Partisan Review and became friends with William Styron, whose novel Sophie's Choice she helped him prepare for publication. A film rights deal with Paramount fell through, and she left for Paris where she began writing on a freelance basis Read more

Her first novel, The Benefactor (1965), was published in England as The Volcano Lover. Her first full-length work of nonfiction, Against Interpretation (1964), presented a case against psychoanalysis and provided a philosophy of art and culture that has been widely influential; it was followed by Death Kit (1967), which was an expanded version of her essay "The Death Kit", published in Partisan Review in 1963. After moving to New York City in 1968, she published novels like The White Album (1970) and essays like "Thinking About Abroad" in Esquire; in 1976, she married Harold Bloom.

She also worked for many years as a book editor, publishing literary criticism in The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and other publications. She died in 2004 at the age of sixty-nine.

The truth is always something that is told, not something...
1
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. Susan Sontag
That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried...
2
That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life. Susan Sontag
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to...
3
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003] Susan Sontag
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent,...
4
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both. Susan Sontag
Writing is a mysterious activity.
5
Writing is a mysterious activity. Susan Sontag
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write...
6
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that. Susan Sontag
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism...
7
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am. Susan Sontag
8
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager. Susan Sontag
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which...
9
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind. Susan Sontag
10
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. Susan Sontag
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at...
11
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. Susan Sontag
My library is an archive of longings.
12
My library is an archive of longings. Susan Sontag
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about...
13
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. Susan Sontag
14
All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Susan Sontag
15
Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.) Susan Sontag
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they...
16
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. Susan Sontag
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into...
17
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. Susan Sontag
No
18
No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. Susan Sontag
It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody...
19
It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's. Susan Sontag
20
We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right. . Susan Sontag
21
Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. Susan Sontag
22
It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. Susan Sontag
23
Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. Susan Sontag
To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people...
24
To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance. Susan Sontag
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated...
25
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. Susan Sontag
26
It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless. Susan Sontag
27
One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience. Susan Sontag
With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence,...
28
With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence. Susan Sontag
29
What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed. Susan Sontag
In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities...
30
In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain. Susan Sontag
The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly...
31
The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local. Susan Sontag
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't...
33
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize. Susan Sontag
Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people...
34
Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more. Susan Sontag
35
Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.) Susan Sontag
36
I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent. Susan Sontag
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between...
37
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence. Susan Sontag
To the militant, identity is everything.
38
To the militant, identity is everything. Susan Sontag
39
Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. 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 as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. Susan Sontag
40
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom. Susan Sontag
41
The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But for that it is necessary to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power. Susan Sontag
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings,...
42
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more. Susan Sontag
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the...
43
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community. Susan Sontag
I must change my life so that I can live...
44
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it. Susan Sontag
45
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. Susan Sontag
46
But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art --it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-- photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac's Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget's Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, form the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography --and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns-- is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger. Susan Sontag
47
The only interesting ideas are heresies Susan Sontag
48
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading. Susan Sontag
49
Most of my reading is rereading. Susan Sontag
50
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. Susan Sontag
51
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. Susan Sontag
52
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. Susan Sontag
53
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life. Susan Sontag
54
Alone, alone. I am alone — I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, I’m here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT. Susan Sontag
55
I am scared, numbed from the marital wars - that deadly, deadening combat which is the opposite, the antithesis of the sharp painful struggles of lovers. Lovers fight with knives and whips, husbands and wives poisoned marshmallows, sleeping pills, and wet blankets. Susan Sontag
56
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world. Susan Sontag
57
Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex. Susan Sontag
58
Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up–up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock. Susan Sontag
59
Rules of taste enforce structures of power. Susan Sontag
60
[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing. Susan Sontag
61
Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do .. They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the .. jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you. Susan Sontag
62
With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven. Susan Sontag
63
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. Susan Sontag
64
We are told we must choose – the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the Susan Sontag
65
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2, 000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. Susan Sontag
66
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories. Susan Sontag
67
Depression is melancholy minus its charms. Susan Sontag
68
Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself – these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation. Susan Sontag
69
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction.... What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Susan Sontag
70
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic. Susan Sontag
71
Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings. Susan Sontag
72
It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices. Susan Sontag
73
For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering. Susan Sontag
74
There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. Susan Sontag
75
Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum. Susan Sontag
76
How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion! Susan Sontag
77
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w Susan Sontag
78
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else. Susan Sontag
79
If one could amputate part of one's consciousness... Susan Sontag
80
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Susan Sontag
81
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head. Susan Sontag
82
Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.) Susan Sontag
83
All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. Susan Sontag
84
All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation. Susan Sontag
85
One can never ask anyone to change a feeling. Susan Sontag
86
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. Susan Sontag
87
We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. Susan Sontag
88
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. Susan Sontag
89
No such thing as a temptation. A temptation is a desire, a lust like any other - but one that we regret afterwards + wish undone (or that we know beforehand we will regret after). So it`s no excuse to say, ``I didn`t mean to do it. I was tempted + I couldn`t resist.`` All one can honestly say is, ``I did it. I`m sorry I did it.``- Reborn Susan Sontag
90
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. Susan Sontag
91
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting. Susan Sontag
92
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication Susan Sontag
93
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present. Susan Sontag
94
I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me. Susan Sontag
95
I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path. Susan Sontag
96
I’m now writing out of rage – and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of ‘real’ aggressivity. I’m sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world. Susan Sontag
97
All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here. Susan Sontag
98
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. Susan Sontag
99
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form. Susan Sontag
100
This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job. Susan Sontag