Quote

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

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
Overstatement
Heroic
Material
Photography
Materials
Kind
World
Copulation

More quotes by Susan Sontag

Image
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
Susan Sontag
Image
Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
Susan Sontag
Image
whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
Susan Sontag
Image
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
Susan Sontag
Image
Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
Susan Sontag
Image
Art is seduction, not rape.
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
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
Image
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
Susan Sontag
Image
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
Susan Sontag
Image
The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag
Image
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Susan Sontag
Image
The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Susan Sontag
Image
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Susan Sontag
Image
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
Susan Sontag
Image
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Susan Sontag
Image
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
Susan Sontag
Image
Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Susan Sontag
Image
Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
Susan Sontag
Image
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag