Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
worst-case-scenario needs taste
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.
answers destroy questions
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions
art artistic beauty decay durable extremely moral morality nowhere physical rapidly tendency
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
surrealism bourgeois universal
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
despair littles expect-nothing
Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
shopping shops
To travel is to shop.
ethical-issues mass-culture minorities
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.
imagination growing disease
Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology...
world-suffering suffering degrade
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
imagination structure pornography
Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
worship values
False values begin with the worship of things.
treasure patient regard
Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
most-amazing idealism phenomenon
The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.
nostalgic
When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.