Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures Susan Sontag nostalgic I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams. Susan Sontag follow-your-dreams dream To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master. Susan Sontag slavery tasks writing Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds. Susan Sontag atheism mind sex Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art Susan Sontag worry people art The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed. Susan Sontag ethical-issues mass-culture minorities Passion paralyzes good taste. Susan Sontag good-taste passion taste I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. Susan Sontag envy attention people All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. Susan Sontag great-art contemplation art The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community. Susan Sontag community change inspirational I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting. Susan Sontag solitude waiting want A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all. Susan Sontag propaganda intention art Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures Susan Sontag circulatory-system literature world Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas. Susan Sontag taste people ideas What we need is to use what we have. Susan Sontag use-it-or-lose-it use needs If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment. Susan Sontag detachment comedy tragedy The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling; it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past. Susan Sontag ignored sex past Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards. Susan Sontag axes ordinary art One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. Susan Sontag frivolous serious play the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself. Susan Sontag building process self
