Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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
Photography
Travel
Seem
Past
Takers
Seems
Robbed
Home
Fervent
Make
Abroad
People
Picture
More quotes by Susan Sontag
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag
We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
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
I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
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
Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
Susan Sontag
...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
Susan Sontag
The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
Susan Sontag
Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.
Susan Sontag
Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
Susan Sontag
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
Susan Sontag
I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
Susan Sontag
Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
Susan Sontag
Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
Susan Sontag
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
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
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
Susan Sontag
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
Susan Sontag
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
