Susan Sontag Quotes

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Susan Sontag

Profession : Author

Birth : January 16, 1933

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

Susan Sontag

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Susan Sontag

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Susan Sontag

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Susan Sontag

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

Susan Sontag

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Susan Sontag

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Susan Sontag

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

Susan Sontag

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

Susan Sontag

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

Susan Sontag

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

Susan Sontag

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Susan Sontag

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Susan Sontag

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

Susan Sontag

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Susan Sontag

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

Susan Sontag

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

Susan Sontag

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Susan Sontag