I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail. — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
“If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the… — 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
The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something… — 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
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
It's so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way - but not… — Susan Sontag Copy Share Image
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can… — 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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. — Susan Sontag Copy Share
The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some… — Susan Sontag Copy Share
