110+ Susan Sontag Quotes On Photography, Writing And Illness

Susan Sontag was an American author, essayist, and filmmaker. She was known for her essays on modern culture and her novel, The Volcano Lover. Sontag was a vocal advocate for human rights and an influential figure in the New York intellectual scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Susan Sontag on photography, writing, love.

Top 10 Susan Sontag Quotes

1. Sanity is a cozy lie.
2. A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
3. The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
4. A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
5. What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
6. I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
7. Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
8. Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
9. In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.
10. Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Susan Sontag Image Quotes

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Short Quotes

• Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.
• Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
• To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
• To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
• The white race is the cancer of human history.
• It is not the position, but the disposition.
• Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
• Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.
• It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
• Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Susan Sontag Quotes About Photography

It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. — Susan Sontag

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing. — Susan Sontag

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. — Susan Sontag

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. — Susan Sontag

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. — Susan Sontag

The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. — Susan Sontag

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

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images. — Susan Sontag

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. — Susan Sontag

All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes About 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. — Susan Sontag

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

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. — Susan Sontag

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail. — Susan Sontag

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony. — Susan Sontag

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through. — Susan Sontag

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive. — Susan Sontag

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

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

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes About Love

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

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons. — Susan Sontag

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone. — Susan Sontag

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love. — Susan Sontag

A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way. — Susan Sontag

I love to read the way people love to watch television. — Susan Sontag

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated. — Susan Sontag

Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings. — Susan Sontag

What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work. — Susan Sontag

Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes About Illness

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. — Susan Sontag

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. — Susan Sontag

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims. — Susan Sontag

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious. — Susan Sontag

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test. — Susan Sontag

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust. — Susan Sontag

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. — Susan Sontag

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes About Art

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 with these twin specters. — Susan Sontag

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. — Susan Sontag

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness. — Susan Sontag

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

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

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. — Susan Sontag

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music. — Susan Sontag

The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes About War

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. — Susan Sontag

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather. — Susan Sontag

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins. — Susan Sontag

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes About Life

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

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

The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. — Susan Sontag

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up — Susan Sontag

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

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. — Susan Sontag

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards. — Susan Sontag

Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal. — Susan Sontag

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view. — Susan Sontag

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes About People

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence. — Susan Sontag

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation. — Susan Sontag

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

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

The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. — Susan Sontag

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. — Susan Sontag

In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed. — Susan Sontag

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence. — Susan Sontag

Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes About Photograph

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. — Susan Sontag

Photographers are always imposing — Susan Sontag

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease. — Susan Sontag

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. — Susan Sontag

Today everything exists to end in a photograph. — Susan Sontag

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire — Susan Sontag

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. — Susan Sontag

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are — Susan Sontag

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque. — Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag Quotes About World

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

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

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

The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. — Susan Sontag

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures — Susan Sontag

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment. — Susan Sontag

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding. — Susan Sontag

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well. — Susan Sontag

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air. — Susan Sontag

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Quotes About Past

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

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. — Susan Sontag

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic. — Susan Sontag

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

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love. — Susan Sontag

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past. — Susan Sontag

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. — Susan Sontag

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. — Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag Famous Quotes And Sayings

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

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

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. — Susan Sontag

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. — Susan Sontag

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

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. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it. — Susan Sontag

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster. — Susan Sontag

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce. — Susan Sontag

The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. — Susan Sontag

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

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

Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms. — Susan Sontag

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'. — Susan Sontag

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies. — Susan Sontag

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

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

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

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. — Susan Sontag

My library is an archive of longings. — Susan Sontag

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. — Susan Sontag

The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. — Susan Sontag

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense. — Susan Sontag

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. — Susan Sontag

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. — Susan Sontag

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. — Susan Sontag

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. — Susan Sontag

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony. — Susan Sontag

Taste has no system and no proofs. — Susan Sontag

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

Bleak factory buildings and billboard-cluttered avenues look as beautiful, through the camera's eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes. — Susan Sontag

To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. — Susan Sontag

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

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 wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination. — Susan Sontag

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Susan Sontag

1. Susan Sontag taught us to think critically and challenge the status quo by questioning the accepted norms of society.
2. She encouraged us to embrace our individualism and express ourselves authentically, without fear of judgement or criticism.
3. Her work also highlighted the importance of empathy and understanding, and how we can use these values to create a more inclusive and tolerant world.