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
artist needs intention
One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.
evil needs blame
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
needs companionship disorder
What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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.
emotional passionate needs
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
worst-case-scenario needs taste
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.
use-it-or-lose-it use needs
What we need is to use what we have.
different needs steel
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
art needs hermeneutics
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
asthmatic bank beastly bleeding city close cosmic data fairly jungle neither nor printed
This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.
admired generation novelist
the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.
affect beat both clock dropping losing mode nod redundant safer seemed somewhere specific time
Somewhere in the nod we were dropping cargo. Somewhere in the nod we were losing infrastructure, losing redundant systems, losing specific gravity. Weightlessness seemed at the time the safer mode. Weightlessness seemed at the time the mode in which we could beat both the clock and affect itself, but I see now that it was not.
clean compromise contradict cowardice embody ethics function gnawing heart intolerant invite moral neither nor principles professed secret society standard tells thinking turning utopian
The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way things really are --- and always will be. How things really are --- and always will be --- is neither all-evil nor all-good but deficient, inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite us to clean up our act; to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting: that secret gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right, and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it.
bed blown constantly elsewhere extension fate hungry novelists perennial perhaps pieces reminded returned sheer surprised time unlikely visited
Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That we are here, prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening, while elsewhere in the world, right now in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio....To be a travelerand novelists are often travelersis to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned home.