Quote

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.

Susan Sontag

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Feel
Wake
Feels
Express
Work
Passionate
Kind
Kinds
Various
Interested
Serious
Alienation
Says
Engagement

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
Susan Sontag
Image
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Susan Sontag
Image
All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Susan Sontag
Image
I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
Susan Sontag
Image
That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.
Susan Sontag
Image
We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
Susan Sontag
Image
War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
Susan Sontag
Image
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
Susan Sontag
Image
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Susan Sontag
Image
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
Susan Sontag
Image
Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
Image
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
Image
Writing is a mysterious activity.
Susan Sontag
Image
Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
Susan Sontag
Image
Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
Susan Sontag
Image
All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
Susan Sontag
Image
Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
Susan Sontag
Image
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag