Sign in with your pod

Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina

Susan Sontag

115 quotes

• “Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963)

• “The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963)

• “The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Benefactor (1963), Ch. 1, p. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• “If America is the culmination of Western white civilisation, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57

• “The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57

• “We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Women, the Arts, & the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag" in Salmagundi, No. 31-32 (Fall/Winter 1975), p. 29; later published in Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995) edited by Leland A. Poague, p. 77

• “Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Fascism" (1974), published in The New York Review of Books (6 February 1975) and reprinted in Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 92,

• “In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Fascinating Fascism" (1974), published in The New York Review of Books (6 February 1975) and reprinted in Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 93

• “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Illness As Metaphor (1978), foreword, p. 3, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• “One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling... which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Susan Sontag: The Rolling Stone Interview" with Jonathan Cott (1978; published 4 October 1979)

• “Not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies — especially when their populations are moved to revolt — but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Speech, Town Hall, New York City (6 February 1982), reported in "Susan Sontag Provokes Debate on Communism", The New York Times (27 February 1982), p. 27

• “The tide of undecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over and bitten into the facades of monuments and the surface of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion... the powerless saying: I'm here, too.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Pleasure of the Image" (1985) from Writers on Artists edited by Daniel Halpern (1988), p. 98, North Point Press

• “It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. That illness can be not an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more convincingly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989), ch. 4, p. 125, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ; later published in combination with Illness As Metaphor. This combined edition is the one referenced here.

• “The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), p. 180

• “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 their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Risk Taker", profile/interview by Gary Younge, The Guardian (19 January 2002)

• “I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Susan Sontag Finds Romance", interview with by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)

• “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Susan Sontag Finds Romance," interview by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)

• “To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Susan Sontag Finds Romance," interview by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)

• “Modernist tasks and liberties have stirred up a canny diffidence among painters of the largest accomplishment when pressed to talk about their art. It appears unseemly, or naive, to have much to say about the pictures or to attach to them any explicit "program." No more theories expounding an ideal way of painting. And, as statements wither and with them counter-statements, hardly anything in the way of provocation either. Decorum suggests that artists sound somewhat trapped when being drawn out, and venturing a few cagey glimpses of intention.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: About Hodgkin," from Howard Hodgkin Paintings edited by Michael Auping (1995), p. 105, Harry N. Abrams

• “The sublimity of color in Hodgkin's pictures can be thought of as, first of all, expressive of gratitude — for the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: About Hodgkin," from Howard Hodgkin Paintings (1995), p. 109

• “Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die. A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place. Wars, genocides — that happened here once, but no longer. It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not "really" Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Why Are We In Kosovo?" in The New York Times Magazine (2 May 1999)

• “Stop the War and Stop the Genocide, read the banners being waved in the demonstrations in Rome and here in Bari. For Peace. Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war?”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Why Are We in Kosovo?", The New York Times (2 May 1999)

• “War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Why Are We in Kosovo?", The New York Times (2 May 1999)

• “Shall I tell you about getting older? When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don't fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty. So what's new?”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Finding fact from fiction", The Guardian (27 May 2000)

• “The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The New Yorker: Talk of the Town (24 September 2001)

• “The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On Photography, 1977

• “What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 5

• “Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 8

• “Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Against Interpretation" (1964)

• “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Against Interpretation" (1964)

• “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Against Interpretation" (1964)

• “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Against Interpretation" (1964)

• “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 14

• “Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Imagination of Disaster" from Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), p. 212

• “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), note 9, p. 279; originally published in Partisan Review, Vol. 31 No. 4, (Fall 1964)

• “The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), note 54, p. 291

• “Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended. ... Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature—the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society—it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In some respects the use of sexual obsessions as a subject for literature resembles the use of a literary subject whose validity for fewer people would contest: religious obsessions. So compared, the familiar fact of pornography’s definite, aggressive impact upon its readers looks somewhat different. Its celebrated intention of sexually stimulating readers is really a species of proselytizing. Pornography that is serious literature aims to “excite” in the same way that books which render an extreme form of religious experience aim to “convert.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “For Cioran the aphoristic style is less a principle of reality than a principle of knowing: that it’s the destiny of every profound idea to be quickly checkmated by another idea, which it itself has implicitly generated.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Don't be too hard on the envious. Be glad you have, or had in the past, something enviable.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: p.73 [Page numbers per the Penguin Modern Classics 2009 Edition]

• “To love one's work is a way of loving oneself, and leaves one freer to love other people. But beware the difference between loving one's work and being merely engrossed in it.”

  Susan Sontag (1933–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

More