Quotes from Susan Sontag

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive.

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

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.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

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?

As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

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

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you.

Ideas disturb the levelness of life

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.