Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
writing because-i-can i-can
...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.
use
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
photography majesty dwarfs
In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs.
writing self bigger
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
reading rereading
Most of my reading is rereading.
self edification actors
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.
ideas tools mold
Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
beautiful rivers smell
In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.
love couple hunting
Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
despair littles expect-nothing
Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
emotional passionate needs
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
morning lying sleep
She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
doubt photograph evidence
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
past quality photograph
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.