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 typewriters junk
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
writing mysterious activity
Writing is a mysterious activity.
art revenge sensual
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
art seduction art-is
Art is seduction, not rape.
passion taste good-taste
Passion paralyzes good taste.
strong world response
One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.
waiting silence needs
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
names feelings want
Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.
photography ideas two
The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
reading literature passports
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
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.