850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.

[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.