850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.