Susan Sontag Quotes

Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.

However painful they were, I needed my dreams — the metaphor for my introspection — if I was ever to be at peace.

The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame?

In contrast, images offering evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged for the camera.

I’m now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of ‘real’ aggressivity. I’m sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world.

I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I am tired.

The most precious thing is vitality – not in any sinister Lawrentian sense, but just the will + energy + appetite to do what one wants to do + not to be ‘sunk’ by disappointments. Aristotle is right: happiness is not to be aimed at; it is a by-product of activity aimed at.

Kindness, kindness, kindness.

I want to make a New year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

I feel profoundly alone, cut off, unattractive…I feel unloveable. But I respect that unloveable solider — struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just, honourable. I respect myself.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

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.

We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? It seems to me that one should always be seeking to talk oneself out of these stark oppositions.

Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

"Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible.