Susan Sontag was a renowned Jewish-American writer, who was also a prolific filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She discovered her undying love for books during her teenage. She started off her career by writing essays for some renowned newspapers and soon published the most notable essay of her career titled “Notes on Camp” which brought her many accolades. This encouraged her to publish her debut novel titled ‘The Benefactor’ where her experimental way of writing failed to fascinate the masses. She further published some successful short-stories and novels before coming up with her first best-selling novel called ‘The Volcano Lover’. After this, she proved to be a versatile writer as she successfully fascinated the masses in different genres of fiction and non-fiction. Her successful works include ‘Essays’, and 'In America’, which won ‘National Book Award for Fiction’. Apart from this, she has also proved her mettle on the big screen by working as a writer and director for a couple of successful movies including ‘Letter from Venice’. Her writings, essays, work, thoughts, books and novels are still very popular among the masses. We bring to you a collection of quotes and sayings by Susan Sontag whose writings and thoughts covered various subjects and viewpoints.
10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
Susan Sontag
It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag
A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
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.
Susan Sontag
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.
Susan Sontag
One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.
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 -
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.
Susan Sontag
Most of my reading is rereading.
Susan Sontag
Desire has no history...
Susan Sontag
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.
Susan Sontag
Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.
Photographs are.
She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
Susan Sontag
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
Susan Sontag
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
Susan Sontag
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.
Susan Sontag
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Susan Sontag
To travel is to shop.
Susan Sontag
Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption.
Susan Sontag
The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.
Susan Sontag
It was not a question of knowledge...but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention.
Susan Sontag
Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting.
Susan Sontag
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
 they will be indifferent. )
 The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence. )
