Quotes by Susan Sontag

About Susan Sontag:

Susan Sontag was an American writer and filmmaker, teacher and political activist, publishing her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Susan Sontag

What we need is to use what we have.

Susan Sontag

It is not the position, but the disposition.

Susan Sontag

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

Susan Sontag

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

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

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

To photograph is to confer importance.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

Susan Sontag

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

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

Susan Sontag

Author Bio

  • NameSusan Sontag
  • DescriptionAmerican writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist
  • BornJanuary 16, 1933
  • DiedDecember 28, 2004
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Film Director; Screenwriter; Professor; Essayist; Novelist
  • WorksOn Photography; Against Interpretation; Illness As Metaphor; AIDS And Its Metaphors; Under The Sign Of Saturn
  • AwardsJerusalem Prize; Prince Of Asturia Literary Prize; Peace Prize Of The German Book Trade; National Book Award; George Polk Award