I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response.… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human… — 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
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
The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and… — 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
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
