850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.

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.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.