Susan Sontag Quotes

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Susan Sontag

Profession : Author

Birth : January 16, 1933

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Susan Sontag

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

Susan Sontag

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Susan Sontag

To photograph is to confer importance.

Susan Sontag

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

Susan Sontag

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Susan Sontag

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

Susan Sontag

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

Susan Sontag

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

Susan Sontag

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

Susan Sontag

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

Susan Sontag

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

Susan Sontag

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Susan Sontag

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

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

Susan Sontag

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

Susan Sontag