850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure – though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.

Pleasure of tragedy is vicarious suicide.

But the past is the biggest country of all, and there’s a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that’s an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live.

In the United States it’s not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

Why wouldn’t you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It’s far more interesting to write about others.

Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, ‘Alice, Alice, what is the answer?’ Her companion replied, ‘There is no answer.’ Gertrude Stein continued, ‘Well, then, what is the question?’ and fell back dead.

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not ’language.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.

It’s beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.