Quotes by "Susan Sontag"

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

My library is an archive of longings.

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.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

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

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

It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

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.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

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

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

It is intolerable to have one's sufferings twinned with anybody else's.