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 thinking talking
I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.
stupid wheels breaking-down
Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
spiritual journey voyages
The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.
generations spirituality
Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.
government world today
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
scar
whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
hypocrisy community roles
One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith ...
distance past cities
A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past-are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.
emotional giving understanding
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
ignorance disease theory
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
book writing levels
You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.
tragedy comedy detachment
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
war weather affair
War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
easier endure changed
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.