Quotes from Susan Sontag

I am only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.

Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsede 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

Most of my reading is rereading.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

The only interesting ideas are heresies.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

Desire has no history...

It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little—have few verbal means. Eloquence—thinking in words—is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another's ambitiousness.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease.

She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.

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

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.

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? [ Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade) , Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

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

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.