Quote

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

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
Another
Despises
Recognizes
Despise
Criticize
Oneself
Example
Artist
Revolted
Others
Criticizes

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
Susan Sontag
Image
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
Susan Sontag
Image
What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
Susan Sontag
Image
I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
Susan Sontag
Image
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
Susan Sontag
Image
One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
Image
Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
Susan Sontag
Image
Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
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
To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
Susan Sontag
Image
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
Susan Sontag
Image
I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
Susan Sontag
Image
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Susan Sontag
Image
Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
Susan Sontag
Image
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.
Susan Sontag
Image
This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
Susan Sontag
Image
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Susan Sontag
Image
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
Susan Sontag
Image
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
Image
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Susan Sontag