Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
Susan Sontag
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Tasks
Master
Slave
Masters
Writer
Auto
Writing
Task
Make
Life
Slavery
More quotes by Susan Sontag
We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
Susan Sontag
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Susan Sontag
I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
Susan Sontag
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
Susan Sontag
The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
Susan Sontag
I love to read the way people love to watch television.
Susan Sontag
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
Susan Sontag
I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.
Susan Sontag
Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
Susan Sontag
One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
Susan Sontag
The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
Susan Sontag
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
Susan Sontag
The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
Susan Sontag
Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
Susan Sontag
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
The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
Susan Sontag
