Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 4

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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

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

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.

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

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

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

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

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

It's almost as if this is the fundamental procedure in modern society: duplication and recycling.

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

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.

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

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

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

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.

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

It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

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

A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

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

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

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

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

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