Susan Sontag Quotes

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

The function of writing is to explode one’s subject — transform it into something else. (Writing is a series of transformations).

The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive (...). But whatever you took home from the movies was only part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours - which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen

رمانی ارزش خواندن دارد که قلب را تعلیم دهد، احساس شما را از امکانات بشری بسط دهد، از آنچه که سرنوشت انسان است و آنچه در جهان رخ می‌دهد. ادبیات در قالب چنین رمانی درون ما را می‌آفریند

Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

I don't intend to let my intellect dominate me, and the last thing I want to do is worship knowledge or people who have knowledge! I don't give a damn for anyone's aggregation of facts, except that it be a reflection [of] basic sensitivity which I do demand... I intend to do everything... to have one way of evaluating experience — does it cause me pleasure or pain and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful — I shall anticipate pleasure everything and find it, too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly... everything matters! The only thing I resign is the power to resign, to retreat: the acceptance of sameness and the intellect. I am alive... I am beautiful... what else is there?

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

True that Benjamin used a communist language in the last years of his life, so he looks different to us now. But that's because he died in 1940. Those last years were the ones in which communist language regained authority — seen as necessary to fight fascism (identified as The Enemy). Had Benjamin lived as long as Adorno he would have become as a-social, as disillusioned with left as Adorno did.

Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle.

Ever since [the Vietnam War], battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment.

And it is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimentality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse.

The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.