The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“But the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art , Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
