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
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.
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.
beauty time past
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
time moments photograph
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
book course good high involved known largely money movies reason simple whether
Of course the movies are going to be the more visible, more high profile, for the simple reason that a lot more money is involved and this is a largely money-oriented society. ... Nevertheless, this is a very good book town, whether it's known to be that or not, and that's why you have something like this.
answers destroy questions
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions
captions depict suffering
Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize,
candid doctors fear keeps
It is only the fear of malpractice that keeps doctors candid in this country.
cope equally large people popular seemingly served threat twin
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
commercial gifted merely naive practiced
Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals,
art artistic beauty decay durable extremely moral morality nowhere physical rapidly tendency
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
hands way moral
Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
successful self feelings
Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
american-author feminine men virile women
What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.