Quote

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

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
Firsts
Project
Domains
Self
Engaged
Sympathies
First
Projects
Territories
Reader
Extension
Dreams
Selves
Writer
Extensions
Literature
Domain
Dream
Territory

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
Susan Sontag
Image
It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
Susan Sontag
Image
Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
Susan Sontag
Image
One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
Susan Sontag
Image
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
Susan Sontag
Image
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
Susan Sontag
Image
The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
Susan Sontag
Image
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
Susan Sontag
Image
The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
Image
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Susan Sontag
Image
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
Susan Sontag
Image
Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
Susan Sontag
Image
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Susan Sontag
Image
I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
Susan Sontag
Image
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
Susan Sontag
Image
All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
Susan Sontag
Image
It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
Susan Sontag
Image
One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
Susan Sontag
Image
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
Susan Sontag
Image
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Susan Sontag