If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories. - Susan Sontag
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. - Susan Sontag
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. - Susan Sontag
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence. - Susan Sontag
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. - Susan Sontag
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more. - Susan Sontag
That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life. - Susan Sontag
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. - Susan Sontag
İnsan sonsuza dek kraliçe kalamaz. Gücünü devam ettirebilmek için ya tahttan vazgeçeceksin, yahut da şehit edileceksin. Ben birincisini seçtim. - Susan Sontag
The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both. - Susan Sontag
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that. - Susan Sontag
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. - Susan Sontag
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003] - Susan Sontag
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
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. - 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
Writing is a mysterious activity. - Susan Sontag
It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices. - Susan Sontag
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am. - Susan Sontag
Sanity is a cozy lie. - Susan Sontag
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease. - Susan Sontag
Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world. - Susan Sontag
10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction. - Susan Sontag
Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock. - Susan Sontag
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. - Susan Sontag
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it. - Susan Sontag
Rules of taste enforce structures of power. - Susan Sontag
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. - Susan Sontag
But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else. - Susan Sontag
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. - Susan Sontag
Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.) - Susan Sontag
Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art. - Susan Sontag
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. - Susan Sontag
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom. - Susan Sontag
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. - Susan Sontag
For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering. - Susan Sontag
Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading. - Susan Sontag