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
self-confidence class lifestyle
This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
risk danger dangerous
The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.
art writing mean
We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.
strong being-in-love feels
What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
plato book self
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
art taken too-much
Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.
artist needs intention
One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.
sex pleasure form
The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
ambition artist mediocrity
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.
moral sponsors playfulness
Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.
life art passion
As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.
life simple land
Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
taste juxtaposition surrealist
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
funny secret television
Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.