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
The camera can be lenient; it is can also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty,… — 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
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
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the… — 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
