Susan Sontag Quotes

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more...

About Author

Susan Lee Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), the short story "The Way We Live Now" (1986) and the novels The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999).
Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or traveling to, areas of conflict, including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about literature, cinema, photography and media, illness, war, human rights, and left-wing politics. Her essays and speeches drew backlash and controversy, and she has been called "one of the most influential critics of her generation".

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or pla...

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

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

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

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 othe...

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can...

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...

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the w

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

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

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

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

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

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

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

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]