Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. Susan Sontag becoming-one ironic world Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not. Susan Sontag art interesting thinking Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty. Susan Sontag cameras unattractive people [M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies. Susan Sontag medicine health military Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society. Susan Sontag physicians health war Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations. Susan Sontag edification actors self Most of my reading is rereading. Susan Sontag rereading reading A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way. Susan Sontag body doe men The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants. Susan Sontag breathing body air His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him. Susan Sontag elderly hate views Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable. Susan Sontag compare inevitable body But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all. Susan Sontag forgiving care culture My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am. Susan Sontag transcendence self writing One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life. Susan Sontag use Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal. Susan Sontag secret funny television The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste. Susan Sontag surrealist juxtaposition taste Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism. Susan Sontag vision tragedy nihilism The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion. Susan Sontag exercise witty men Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology. Susan Sontag growing disease imagination Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses. Susan Sontag cancer patient disease
