When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets. Susan Sontag stupiditystupidlong Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.'' Susan Sontag revengeorderart Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea. Susan Sontag moldtoolsideas Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. Susan Sontag vacationfuntravel To us, the difference between the # photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from # photography as document. But both are logical extensions of what photography means: note-taking on, potentially, everything in the world, from every possible angle. Susan Sontag photographymeanart To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement. Susan Sontag frustrationreadingworld It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived. Susan Sontag touchingmemoriespast The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched. Susan Sontag wayworldart The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart. Susan Sontag storiesheartwriting In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable. Susan Sontag criticismrealart In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all. Susan Sontag vocabularylanguagephotography If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that. Susan Sontag junktypewriterswriting Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy. Susan Sontag magazinesperfectionlooks The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. Susan Sontag campsseriousrelation Art is seduction, not rape. Susan Sontag seductionart-isart People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration. Susan Sontag frustrationemotionalpeople One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another. Susan Sontag taskscultureart art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past. Susan Sontag would-bepastart Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to! Susan Sontag painperfectgiving The really important thing is not to reject anything. Susan Sontag rejectsimportant-thingsimportant
