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Susan Sontag Biography

Susan Sontag (/ˈsɒntæɡ/; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; 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.

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Susan Sontag Quotes

Most writers I know have switched to word processors. I haven't but I'm very curious about why people like it so much. I think it has something to do with the fact that at last writing, which has been such an old-fashioned, artisanal activity, even on a typewriter, has now entered the central domain of modern experience which is that of making copies, being involved in the world of duplicates and machine-mediated activities.

Switched, Think, Thinking, Typewriters, Word, Writing

In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

Language, Larger, Photography, Pitched, Smaller, Vocabulary

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

Particular, Past, Pathos, Photograph, Quality, Tend

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Ideas, Intelligence, Intelligent, Kind

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

Writing, Typewriters, Junk, Write, Expressing

Art is a form of consciousness.

Art, Consciousness, Form

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

Generation, Generations, Reinvent, Spirituality

I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.

Formalists, Interested, Jargon, Literary, Writing, Years

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Failure, Criticism, Lapses, Radical, Wrong

All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.

Community, Elsewhere, Global, Resistance, Struggle

America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

America, Colored, Europeans, Order, Take, White

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Attention, Eagerness, Stay, Vitality

A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture

Exists, Given, May, Photograph, Proof

Most of my reading is rereading.

Reading, Rereading

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

Writing, Elements, Alive, Throw, Work

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.

Art, Inhabiting, Mean, Smell, Writing

The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinate.

Danger, Dangerous, Fascinate, Risk

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.

Contemporary, Creative, Culture, Moral, Two

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

Consciousness, Idols, Moral, Morality, Pursuit, Sin

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

Art, Connects, Continues, Old, Past, Years

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