850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

It is passivity that dulls feeling.

As long as art is understood and valued as an “absolute” activity, it will be a separate, elitist one. Elites presuppose masses. So far as the best art defines itself by essentially “priestly” aims, it presupposes and confirms the existence of a relatively passive, never fully initiated, voyeuristic laity which is regularly convoked to watch, listen, read, or hear — and then sent away.

I am tired. I would like to be a mountain, a tree, a stone.

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

La fotografía usurpó al pintor en la tarea de suministrar imágenes que transcriban la realidad con precisión. Weston insiste en que, por ello, «el pintor tendría que estar profundamente agradecido», pues como tantos fotógrafos anteriores y posteriores a él considera que la usurpación es en realidad una liberación. Al apropiarse de la tarea de retratar de manera realista, otrora monopolizada por la pintura, la fotografía liberó a la pintura para su gran vocación moderna: la abstracción.

To say a feeling, an impression is to diminish it - expel it

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.

Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and an object of surveillance (for rulers).