There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what… — 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