Susan Sontag Quotes

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

I write to know what I think.

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.

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by. The movement itself is the essence of the day.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.

To me, as an intellectual, art is not simply a matter of aesthetic pleasure, but a way of considering the world and focusing one’s thoughts.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

The knowledge gained through art is knowledge in the most complete sense of the word. It passes into understanding.

The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of highly varied paintings without ever discovering what the impact of one is on another. They can follow a score of highly complex and difficult operas and never hear the second bar of music.

Art is the ultimate affirmation of our worth as human beings.

Susan Sontag Quotes part 2

Every art form is a way to make life more bearable, to create a place where we feel we belong.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

The problem is not that the reality is too difficult to capture, but that it is too easy.

I am trying to describe the zone where nothing happens.

I write as a woman who has had much sadness; someone who, even when she was most happy, could always see fear looming.

Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.

Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative, and final analysis.

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies.

Life is not enough for meaning? Then death is the answer.

Love is unbearable for most people. It is too exposing, too overwhelming, too profound and too risky.

It is wrong to be cynical about the immediate financial interests of others and naive about our own. The totalitarian impulse lives on in all of us.

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

There are more truths in twenty-four hours than in all the philosophies.

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels.

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

The most implausible conjectures which history is full of are often less implausible than the yarns spun by psychologists. Or shall we say, a good deal more plausible.

The art of making art is putting it together.

In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is to be feared, not celebrated.

Write pages and pages of rubbish now, as fast as you can, with no critical sense whatsoever. The duller, the better.

Art is often made to be seen and not rationally explained.

The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare to articulate it as such, is that there are no boundaries in the universe.

There is no measure of time, or of wrinkling, or of forgetting, or of waiting, or of remembering, or of the lapses of attention which is anything but art.

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.

Coherence, I found, is contingent on discord.

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

There are so many books in the world and staying awake for all of them is not an option.

People should try to leave the world better than they found it, and it’s impossible to leave the world a better place without being brave enough to say what you really mean.

To label every bisexually active man as homosexual is to deny the reality of the bisexual.

The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Photography is a love affair with life.

Writing is a kind of remorse which slips out of control. It becomes a wild indulgence.

The image-maker wants to remake the world, to shape it, evoke it, create the possible. The image-maker wants to see how the world, in our hands, could be made different — made new. In its vividness, the new could leap off the page, seem more precious, more circumscribed in its existence. The uniformity of aesthetic pleasure starts on the premise that the world we know is enough. Enough of what? Pretty things: images that are — in every art — all surface. This image-culture lays presumption to the average existence. Its omnipotence trivializes and reduces. Savoring, not sharing or participation is the point of existence. The image-world annihilates continuity.