Quote

Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

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
Pornography
Representation
Images
Experiences
Structure
Aren
Pornographic
Imagination
Representations
Structures

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
Susan Sontag
Image
I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
Susan Sontag
Image
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag
Image
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
Susan Sontag
Image
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
Susan Sontag
Image
Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
Susan Sontag
Image
An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
Susan Sontag
Image
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
Susan Sontag
Image
Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
Susan Sontag
Image
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
Susan Sontag
Image
Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
Susan Sontag
Image
We are ruled by quotations.
Susan Sontag
Image
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
Image
It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
Susan Sontag
Image
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
Susan Sontag
Image
Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
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
I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
Susan Sontag
Image
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
Susan Sontag
Image
The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
Susan Sontag