“I am not myself with people [...] but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.” — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. — 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
The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people… — 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
taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious… — 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… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of… — 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
Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. Cancerphobia taught us the… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. — 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
Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same. — 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… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served… — 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