My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. Susan Sontag resemblance-is light photography What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up Susan Sontag opening-up healthy ordinary An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious. Susan Sontag savages important jobs Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. Susan Sontag photography real art Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease. Susan Sontag understanding ease promise Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms. Susan Sontag successful self feelings Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images. Susan Sontag photography reality way Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire Susan Sontag pieces reality world Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness. Susan Sontag intellectual beauty art In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity. Susan Sontag spiritual feelings insanity Literature usually begets literature. Susan Sontag begets literature ...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies. Susan Sontag poet real self Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing. Susan Sontag able life moving The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas. Susan Sontag cutting creative ideas In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Susan Sontag sensual revenge art The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo. Susan Sontag historical intellectual change When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in. Susan Sontag leaks comedy failing Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head. Susan Sontag silence waiting sound If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories. Susan Sontag literature self dream It is passivity that dulls feeling. Susan Sontag passivity feelings
