Susan Sontag Quotes
Susan Sontag was a 20th and early 21st-century American writer, critic, and political activist, one of the most prominent public intellectuals of her generation. Her essays, including Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, and Notes on Camp, brought continental philosophical and aesthetic concerns to a wide American readership. The quotes below are attributed to Susan Sontag, organized by topic.
Browse Susan Sontag by topic
Susan Sontag on Death
-
Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“All photographs are memento mori.”
-
Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.”
Susan Sontag on Justice
-
“If America is the culmination of Western white civilisation, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilisation.”
Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57
Susan Sontag on Knowledge
-
Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
-
Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“Reading is the quintessential passion.”
-
“The truth is that Mozart , Pascal , Boolean Algebra , Shakespeare , parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton , the emancipation of women, Kant , Marx , and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous c”
Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57
Susan Sontag on Life
-
“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.”
Illness As Metaphor (1978), foreword, p. 3, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-374-52073-9 -
“The truth is that Mozart , Pascal , Boolean Algebra , Shakespeare , parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton , the emancipation of women, Kant , Marx , and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”
Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57
Susan Sontag on Love
-
“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 14
Susan Sontag on Mind
-
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
p. 7
Susan Sontag on Time
-
Attributed to Susan Sontag:
“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
-
“Ours is an age which consciously pursues health , and yet only believes in the reality of sickness . The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.”
Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil , The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963)
Susan Sontag on Truth
-
“The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”
Review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil , The New York Review of Books (1 February 1963) -
“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.”
The Benefactor (1963), Ch. 1, p. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42012-9
Things actually not said by Susan Sontag
A number of widely-shared lines are circulated as Susan Sontag but are in fact from someone else. Did Susan Sontag say these? No. Each entry below pairs the line with the person who actually wrote it.
-
Did Susan Sontag say this? No.
“Styles change, style doesn't.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Styles, like everything else, change. Style doesn't. - Linda Ellerbee , Move On: Adventures in the Real World (1991), p. 35 G.P. Putnam's Sons ISBN 0399136231