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

That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.

Susan Sontag

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

Susan Sontag

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. No...

Susan Sontag

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

Susan Sontag

Writing is a mysterious activity.

Susan Sontag

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

Susan Sontag

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

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

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

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

Susan Sontag

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Sontag

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

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

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