Quote

Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

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
History
Unlike
Photographic
Others
Images
Biography
Photograph
Invariably
Photography
Implies
Evidence
Biographies
Usually
Ongoing
Painting
Paintings
Pieces
Photographs

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
Susan Sontag
Image
Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
Susan Sontag
Image
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Susan Sontag
Image
Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
Susan Sontag
Image
Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
Susan Sontag
Image
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
Image
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Susan Sontag
Image
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
Susan Sontag
Image
Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
Susan Sontag
Image
The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
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
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
Image
Art is a form of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
Image
The only interesting ideas are heresies
Susan Sontag
Image
In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Susan Sontag
Image
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
Susan Sontag
Image
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
Susan Sontag
Image
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Susan Sontag
Image
The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
Susan Sontag
Image
It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
Susan Sontag