Susan Sontag quotes

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. (Susan Sontag)
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.
Susan Sontag
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
Susan Sontag
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
Susan Sontag
So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
Susan Sontag
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag
Life is a movie; death is a photograph.
Susan Sontag
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Susan Sontag
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
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
Sanity is a cozy lie. (Susan Sontag)
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
Susan Sontag
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
Susan Sontag
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Susan Sontag
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.
Susan Sontag
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
Susan Sontag
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
Susan Sontag
Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Susan Sontag
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
Susan Sontag
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. (Susan Sontag)
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
Susan Sontag
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Susan Sontag
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Susan Sontag