You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place. Susan Sontag exoticperspectiveassociation 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-islightphotography 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-uphealthyordinary An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious. Susan Sontag savagesimportantjobs Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. Susan Sontag photographyrealart 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 understandingeasepromise 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 successfulselffeelings 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 photographyrealityway 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 piecesrealityworld 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 intellectualbeautyart 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 spiritualfeelingsinsanity Literature usually begets literature. Susan Sontag begetsliterature ...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 poetrealself 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 ablelifemoving 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 cuttingcreativeideas 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 sensualrevengeart 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 historicalintellectualchange When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in. Susan Sontag leakscomedyfailing 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 silencewaitingsound 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 literatureselfdream
