Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“The Cavaliere has retired to his study and reads, trying not to think about what is going on around him -- one… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied, and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart. — 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
