850 Quotes by Susan Sontag

Creativity needs to be taken care of. It’s like a big baby that needs to be nourished.

A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

It is intolerable to have one’s sufferings twinned with anybody else’s.

I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation – a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one’s existence as a sexual being – while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up.

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.

Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That’s how they’re able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.

When something is just bad, it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish.