What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view realistically; that is, with an eye to expense… — 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