850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

When the right person does the wrong thing, it’s the right thing.

The early Romantic sought superiority by desiring, and by desiring to desire, more intensely than others do.

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.

Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don’t live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

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.

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.

I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them.

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty – of the indefinite expansion of possibility.