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Susan Sontag [1933-2004] American

Rank: 101
Author, Writer

Susan Sontag was an American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964.

Alone, Dreams, Equality, Failure, Famous, Future, Intelligence, Travel, Truth, Women, Work

Quote	Tags	Rank
Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.	Travel	101
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.		102
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.	Work	103
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.		104
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.		105
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.		106
To photograph is to confer importance.		107
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.		108
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.	Alone	109
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.		110
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.	Intelligence	111
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.	Future	112
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.	Women	113
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.		114
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.	Truth	115
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.		116
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.	Dreams	117
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.		118
Sanity is a cozy lie.		119
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.		120
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.		121
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.		122
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.		123
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.		124
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.		125
It is not the position, but the disposition.		126
What we need is to use what we have.		201
The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.		202
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.		203
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.		204
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.		205
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.		206
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.	Equality	207
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.		208
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.		209
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.		210
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.		211
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.		212
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.		213
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.		214
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.		215
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.		216
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.		217
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.		218
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.		219
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.	Famous	220
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.		221
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.		222
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.		223
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.		224
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.		225
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.		226
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.		301
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.		302
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.		303
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.		304
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.		305
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.		306
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.		307
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.	Failure	308
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.		309

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