Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
Susan Sontag
Related Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry, an... LAURIE BUCHANAN, PHD To be, or not to be, that is the question. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Sheep don’t need the shepherd to be what they are. The shepherd needs sheep to be what he is. LJUPKA CVETANOVA To be or not to be. That's not really a question. JEAN-LUC GODARD Next generations will not know what is to have childhood. DANIEL MELGAçO It is what it is, it is what you make it. JAMES DURBIN Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day. CRAIG GROESCHEL Do I have the courage of being a ruthless man to myself with the complete knowledge on my manner or ... FEREIDOON YAZDI Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan ... CAITLIN MORAN To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be. GOLDA MEIR To be mad is worse than not to be if this is what it is. JOHNNY RICH Hamlet's Cat's Soliloquy "To go outside, and there perchance to stay Or to re... HENRY N. BEARD To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being. TOM ROBBINS Ques eso? Queso? NOLAN J. VANDER HAAGEN Tell your story to the universe and Let your actions speak LOVE.' No matter what it is. NAPZ CHERUB PELLAZO You know, I don't think my music is important, I don't think it's changing the world, I ... SUFJAN STEVENS See the world for what it is. BEAUTIFUL! ANTHONY T. HINCKS What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism. OCTAVIO PAZ I regret that I wasn't more successful with my marriages, but it is what it is. TED TURNER 35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give... JAMES C. DOBSON How do you know if something is real? That’s easy. Does it change you? Does it form you? Does it g... C. JOYBELL C. The art of the police is not to see what it is useless that it should see. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drive... LOUIE SCHWARTZBERG Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see. PAUL KLEE Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see. PAUL KLEE Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see PAUL KLEE What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is... ITALO CALVINO Art is interesting because there can be so many different perspectives in a piece of art. The way I ... JOAKIM NOAH You don't tell an astronaut what to do. ATMOSPHERE Human is what he decides to be. ZAMAN ALI You gotta pay your dues to sing the blues. CAROL PLUM-UCCI You're supposed to be kind to everyone, because you never know when you're meeting an angel. CAROL PLUM-UCCI The art is huge. What people see is just as important as what they hear. JEFF PETERSEN What love is it, then, that has no need of words to call us? In whose image are we made, to take suc... CHRISTIAN BOBIN Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. DWIGHT D EISENHOWER Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surpr... C.S. LEWIS Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It... ANNE ROIPHE What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science ... HENRY A. WALLACE Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is ... CHRISTOPHER LASCH Art is not a metonym for truth telling. All art is a form of a falsifying; otherwise why would anyon... KILROY J. OLDSTER We all are wearing many hundred glasses of different colors. Therefore, everyone sees the world in d... MUDITHA CHAMPIKA To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see ... MARCEL DUCHAMP When push comes to shove would people do what they felt was right, to get justice done or would they... GARY F EVANS... Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us. ROY ADZAK What is it that makes you so angry, bothers you so deeply, that you're compelled to act? CRAIG GROESCHEL Is getting well ever an art/ Or art a way to get well. ROBERT LOWELL Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag. SUSAN SONTAG Unpredictability means what it means. I don't know how you define it. It is what it is. MICHAEL KEATON You never know about the art world because it's a matter of opinion. If you look at old art like... PETER SAUL She was indomitable. [About Susan Sontag] MICHAEL SILVERBLATT I think we all want to find the love of our life and live our fantasies. What art student hasn't... MAX MINGHELLA Art is what we call...the thing an artist does. It's not the medium or the oil or the pri... SETH GODIN Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past, that was mixe... ANTONY GORMLEY An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work o... OSCAR WILDE Anyways, that very same night there was a fight in the casino on B Deck. Some of the passengers got ... CHRISTINA ENGELA Contentment is not satisfaction. It is the grateful, faithful, fruitful use of what we have, little ... MALTBIE D. BABCOCK Art is not just a display of beauty. Art also reflects what is ugly, and it celebrates the grotesque... KILROY J. OLDSTER I stunk. What went wrong? Everything, ... I was terrible. It was embarrassing. Not being able to get... AL LEITER Art is what gets us beyond what is real. It makes reality more real. It also shortens the distance w... LAURA PRITCHETT Whether we know it or not, each of our decisions is influenced by what we want to see or think. KYLE HILL I know that David Tennant's Hamlet isn't till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who ... NEIL GAIMAN Service is not the art of getting but it is the art of giving. ROSUALDO PONCE Besides learning to see, there is another art to be learned - not to see what is not MARIA MITCHELL Besides learning to see, there is another art to be learned - not to see what is not MARIA MITCHELL Life is not really what it seems like at times; what you see, hear, read or even taste isn't really ... ROSA M. BETANCES We all must learn that in some cases there is something much worse than saying the wrong thing; that... RICHARD BELLZON I dialed the number slowly, wanting to get it right. Two rings, and he picked up. "Yes," I sai... SARAH DESSEN The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are deali... ROBERT MOTHERWELL Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make th... MAYA LIN It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is co... JOSEF ALBERS The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own expe... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper... SUSAN SONTAG Szerzetesek, vannak tanulatlan, közönséges emberek, akik nem gondolnak a nemes dolgokkal, nem hal... GAUTAMA BUDDHA És Brahmá, a Teremtő, felső ruháját fél vállán átvetve, összetett kézzel meghajolt a Mag... GAUTAMA BUDDHA It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else... Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delive... DAN FLAVIN With '10,000,' our aim was to make a film that was entertaining and a roller-coaster ride; i... STEVEN STRAIT We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it... BILLY AL BENGSTON ... it is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self-consciousness; to make us mo... JAMES JOSEPH SYLVESTER I consider a dream like I consider a shadow,” answered Caeiro, with his usual divine, unexpected p... ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS Here is an entire institute devoted to glorifying the art of cooking, KELSEY GRAMMER Even when I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art. I think my parents took... BARBARA KRUGER Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that t... PATTI SMITH JUST KIDS What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct. OVID We must continue to judge of slavery by what it is, and not by what you tell us it will, or may be. GERRIT SMITH Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse. JOSEPH ROUX Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse JOSEPH ROUX Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forc... AMIRI BARAKA Thought is more important than art. . . . To revere art and have no understanding of the process tha... IMAMU AMIRI BARAKA Things don’t have significance: they only have existence. Things are the only hidden meaning ... ALBERTO CAEIRO Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discrimin... WALTER PATER What underlies great science is what underlies great art, whether it is visual or written, and that ... DIANA GABALDON Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. EDGAR DEGAS People want the here and now, rather than the there and after; as most are living in the where and w... ANTHONY LICCIONE When you add love to sex, it feels as if your soul is being drawn from the chains of gravity into th... CHLOE THURLOW Love? I always thought love was just something that ate away your sanity, left you with an inferiori... TOMOKO HAYAKAWA
More Susan Sontag
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considere... SUSAN SONTAG The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both. SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. -Susan Sontag. SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precio... SUSAN SONTAG It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the fin... SUSAN SONTAG Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating th... SUSAN SONTAG War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is,... SUSAN SONTAG Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the... SUSAN SONTAG Al forms of consensus about great books and perennial problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate... SUSAN SONTAG American energy is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chro... SUSAN SONTAG The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of A... SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own expe... SUSAN SONTAG In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art ... SUSAN SONTAG Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the ra... SUSAN SONTAG Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading towa... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe... SUSAN SONTAG The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication. SUSAN SONTAG Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The questio... SUSAN SONTAG A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world." [Speech upon being awa... SUSAN SONTAG Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. SUSAN SONTAG Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more ... SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou... SUSAN SONTAG Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. I... SUSAN SONTAG Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, e... SUSAN SONTAG The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities. SUSAN SONTAG The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph -- only less inter... SUSAN SONTAG In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents ... SUSAN SONTAG The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontroll... SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. SUSAN SONTAG Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be ... SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char... SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion ... SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s... SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature. SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ... SUSAN SONTAG Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. SUSAN SONTAG In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret. SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains o... SUSAN SONTAG Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest sub... SUSAN SONTAG What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full hu... SUSAN SONTAG Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative... SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou... SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the... SUSAN SONTAG Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of men... SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms,... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits. SUSAN SONTAG We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting... SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence,... SUSAN SONTAG AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It ... SUSAN SONTAG AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder... SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a pa... SUSAN SONTAG Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness -- pushing us... SUSAN SONTAG Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone n... SUSAN SONTAG The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion ... SUSAN SONTAG What we need is to use what we have. SUSAN SONTAG Sanity is a cozy lie. SUSAN SONTAG It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized,... SUSAN SONTAG The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and... SUSAN SONTAG Taste has no system and no proofs. SUSAN SONTAG The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture... SUSAN SONTAG One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking o... SUSAN SONTAG I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kind... SUSAN SONTAG Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability.... SUSAN SONTAG As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people t... SUSAN SONTAG Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. SUSAN SONTAG The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. SUSAN SONTAG The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of... SUSAN SONTAG I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. SUSAN SONTAG The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions. SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. SUSAN SONTAG Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists... SUSAN SONTAG Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech. SUSAN SONTAG What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine w... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is the most simple form of self-defence. SUSAN SONTAG It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less intere... SUSAN SONTAG Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the s... SUSAN SONTAG For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of ... SUSAN SONTAG The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured m... SUSAN SONTAG To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. SUSAN SONTAG The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wis... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. SUSAN SONTAG Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc... SUSAN SONTAG Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past... SUSAN SONTAG Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, th... SUSAN SONTAG My library is an archive of longings. SUSAN SONTAG We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the cal... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own exper... SUSAN SONTAG We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if n... SUSAN SONTAG Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to the... SUSAN SONTAG Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after yea... SUSAN SONTAG I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams SUSAN SONTAG I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really h... SUSAN SONTAG Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p... SUSAN SONTAG Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on va... SUSAN SONTAG Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an ind... SUSAN SONTAG Depression is melancholy minus its charms. SUSAN SONTAG Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational term... SUSAN SONTAG The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in... SUSAN SONTAG Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and p... SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intelle... SUSAN SONTAG A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remai... SUSAN SONTAG I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a pass... SUSAN SONTAG Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style-but a particular style. It is the love of the exagge... SUSAN SONTAG 'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love o... SUSAN SONTAG It is not the position, but the disposition. SUSAN SONTAG The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions SUSAN SONTAG Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by... SUSAN SONTAG To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Pre... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. SUSAN SONTAG Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more l... SUSAN SONTAG Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. SUSAN SONTAG All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memor... SUSAN SONTAG The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion o... SUSAN SONTAG American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed ... SUSAN SONTAG Today everything exists to end in a photograph. SUSAN SONTAG All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or t... SUSAN SONTAG Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a s... SUSAN SONTAG Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citiz... SUSAN SONTAG Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [... SUSAN SONTAG People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens... SUSAN SONTAG So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympath... SUSAN SONTAG All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If ... SUSAN SONTAG To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which doe... SUSAN SONTAG Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs ar... SUSAN SONTAG Desire has no history... SUSAN SONTAG Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--on... SUSAN SONTAG Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics... SUSAN SONTAG Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, dri... SUSAN SONTAG How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion! SUSAN SONTAG As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel... SUSAN SONTAG Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the ... SUSAN SONTAG I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. SUSAN SONTAG Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen c... SUSAN SONTAG [O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing. SUSAN SONTAG Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehe... SUSAN SONTAG Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate fo... SUSAN SONTAG A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated sp... SUSAN SONTAG Lying is an elementary means of self-defense. SUSAN SONTAG Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extensi... SUSAN SONTAG Rules of taste enforce structures of power. SUSAN SONTAG Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth read... SUSAN SONTAG All photographs are memento mori. SUSAN SONTAG With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the char... SUSAN SONTAG The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art / and, by analogy, our own exper... SUSAN SONTAG The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual dis... SUSAN SONTAG Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize, SUSAN SONTAG Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminenc... SUSAN SONTAG This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of b... SUSAN SONTAG The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjec... SUSAN SONTAG It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow t... SUSAN SONTAG A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is ... SUSAN SONTAG The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged,... SUSAN SONTAG The Way We Live Now SUSAN SONTAG Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that... SUSAN SONTAG In the final analysis, ''style'' is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of styli... SUSAN SONTAG He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser. SUSAN SONTAG With more people, there are more voices to tune out. SUSAN SONTAG Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. SUSAN SONTAG Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its "vi... SUSAN SONTAG Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to det... SUSAN SONTAG The aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by ne... SUSAN SONTAG It seems positively unnatural to travel without taking a camera along... The very activity of taking... SUSAN SONTAG But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo... SUSAN SONTAG Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled re... SUSAN SONTAG It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other pe... SUSAN SONTAG One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The na... SUSAN SONTAG The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations... SUSAN SONTAG [Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A ... SUSAN SONTAG Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ... SUSAN SONTAG The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste... SUSAN SONTAG Books are funny little portable pieces of thought. SUSAN SONTAG Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in ou... SUSAN SONTAG What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women... SUSAN SONTAG Perversity is the muse of modern literature SUSAN SONTAG What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual ... SUSAN SONTAG It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, preciou... SUSAN SONTAG My idea of a writer: someone interested in 'everything,' SUSAN SONTAG I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them SUSAN SONTAG The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of... SUSAN SONTAG Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. SUSAN SONTAG A great private collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. ... SUSAN SONTAG