Quote

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

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
May
Must
Thinking
Life
Stifle
People
Regulated
Appetite
Sensible

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.
Susan Sontag
Image
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Susan Sontag
Image
God, living is enormous!
Susan Sontag
Image
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
Susan Sontag
Image
I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
Susan Sontag
Image
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
Image
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
Image
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
Susan Sontag
Image
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
Susan Sontag
Image
What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
Susan Sontag
Image
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
Image
Most of my reading is rereading.
Susan Sontag
Image
I love to read the way people love to watch television.
Susan Sontag
Image
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
Image
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Susan Sontag
Image
Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
Susan Sontag
Image
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
Susan Sontag
Image
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
Image
Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
Susan Sontag
Image
Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
Susan Sontag