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
real book ideas
Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.
unrequited-love past devotion
I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.
discovery idols lust
A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol - is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry.
couple hunting tacit
Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.
two creative minorities
Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
art consciousness art-is
Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
feelings institutions committed
[On marriage:] It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.
passion past photographer
Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.
photograph instant maxims
The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
two world extinction
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
truth lying party
I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.
cancer race civilization
The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it aloneits ideologies and inventionswhich eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
two people female
The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.
sadness wings sorrow
In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.