Susan Sontag Quotes

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Susan Sontag

Profession : Author

Birth : January 16, 1933

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. 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

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

Susan Sontag

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Susan Sontag

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

Susan Sontag

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

Susan Sontag

Sanity is a cozy lie.

Susan Sontag

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Susan Sontag

It is not the position, but the disposition.

Susan Sontag

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Susan Sontag

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Susan Sontag

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Susan Sontag

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

Susan Sontag

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

What we need is to use what we have.

Susan Sontag

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

Susan Sontag

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

Susan Sontag