Susan Sontag

Bekannte Zitate von Susan Sontag

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. 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.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

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

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.