Quote

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

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
Giving
People
Attracted
Permission
Burn
Mad
Stand
Alone
Give

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
Susan Sontag
Image
Writing is a mysterious activity.
Susan Sontag
Image
Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
Susan Sontag
Image
All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
Susan Sontag
Image
Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
Susan Sontag
Image
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag
Image
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
Susan Sontag
Image
The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag
Image
To photograph is to confer importance.
Susan Sontag
Image
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag
Image
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
Image
I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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 want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
Susan Sontag
Image
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
Susan Sontag
Image
One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
Susan Sontag
Image
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Susan Sontag
Image
Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
Susan Sontag
Image
The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
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