Susan Sontag Quotes

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Susan Sontag

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

Best, Society, Mad

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag

Painter, Constructs, Discloses

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.
Susan Sontag

Change, Beauty, Past

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

Truth, Writing, Known

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
Susan Sontag

Travel, Strategy, Becomes

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

Easy, Fiction, Soft

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

Sex, Aids, Obliges

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.
Susan Sontag

Seems, Taken, Large

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

Others, Ambition, Feeds

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Susan Sontag

Important, Whose, Disease

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

Nature, History, Seen

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.
Susan Sontag

Fear, Political, Real

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

Future, Past, Present

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.
Susan Sontag

Equality, Future, Country

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.
Susan Sontag

Work, Serious, Interested

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

Art, Nothing, Less

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.
Susan Sontag

Bad, Wrong, Less

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

Suffering, Deeply, Feared

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag

Life, Forever, Details

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.
Susan Sontag

Place, Start, Making

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag

Today, End, Book

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
Susan Sontag

Someone, Everything, Idea

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

Art, Science, Films

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.
Susan Sontag

Beautiful, Successful, Become

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Author

Born: January 28, 1933

Died: December 28, 2004

Links

Find on Amazon: Susan Sontag

Cite this Page: Citation

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