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 More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter. Susan Sontag psychologymatterhistory The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence. Susan Sontag fournutspeople Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are Susan Sontag camerasdrawingreality In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it. Susan Sontag photographyamericapast When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures. Susan Sontag nostalgic AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. Susan Sontag suicidesexthinking A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness. Susan Sontag educationheartbook Shouting has never made me understand anything. Susan Sontag shoutingangermade The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. Susan Sontag malestwopeople Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum. Susan Sontag grandparentessentialsmuseums To photograph is to confer importance. Susan Sontag importancephotographphotography Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you. Susan Sontag spacehappensorder As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. Susan Sontag weaknessdifferentneeds One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness. Susan Sontag despiseartistexample I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony. Susan Sontag agonypassionatewriting In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life. Susan Sontag want War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon. Susan Sontag warlongyears I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. Susan Sontag encouraginginspirationallife The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both. Susan Sontag guiltinspirationwriting Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past. Susan Sontag passionphotographerpast
