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
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
That tendency of social thought to generalize, to describe a leading tendency in a society in such a way that it seems… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Two kinds of writers. Those who think this life is all there is, and want to describe everything: the fall, the battle,… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. — 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
We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it… — 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
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
