Susan sontag quotes

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Ideas disturb the levelness of life

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

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

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

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy

What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

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.

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art

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

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

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.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.

It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

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

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

My library is an archive of longings.

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

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

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

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.

Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.

Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.

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

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

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

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.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

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

The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and assertiveness it may not have had in the original. I think the quality of inaccessibility, the mystery, is important - that whatever matters can't be taken in on just one reading or one seeing. This is certainly a quality of the little of art that lasts.

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

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.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.

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.

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.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

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

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

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

All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.

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.

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.

I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.

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.

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

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.

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.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

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

Art is a form of consciousness.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

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

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

What we need is to use what we have.

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.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

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.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

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.

One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

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

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.

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

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

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

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.

The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.

...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

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.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words.

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.

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

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, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

Love dies because its birth was an error.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

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.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

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

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.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.

How boring just to be a body.

The only interesting ideas are heresies

It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.

whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties

Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Photographers are always imposing