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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.

Susan Sontag

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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
People
Indifferent
Wherever
Safe
Feel
Feels

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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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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.
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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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To photograph is to confer importance.
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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
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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.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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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.
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In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
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Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
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