24 Quotes By Susan Sontag


Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Susan Sontag on alone

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

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 on beauty

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 on change

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 on death

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

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 on equality

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 on experience

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

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
Susan Sontag on family

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 famous

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 on fear

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
Susan Sontag on funny

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

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 on future

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

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

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag on intelligence

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

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