Quote

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

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
Appears
Begins
Accepting
Understanding
World

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
Susan Sontag
Image
The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
Susan Sontag
Image
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
Susan Sontag
Image
An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
Susan Sontag
Image
By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Susan Sontag
Image
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
Susan Sontag
Image
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
Image
I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
Susan Sontag
Image
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
Image
Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
Susan Sontag
Image
The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
Susan Sontag
Image
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Susan Sontag
Image
Art is a form of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
Image
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Susan Sontag
Image
Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
Susan Sontag
Image
Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Susan Sontag
Image
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
Susan Sontag
Image
That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
Susan Sontag
Image
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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