1933-, American Essayist
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Susan Sontag – [Travel and Tourism]
Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
Susan Sontag – [Victims]
War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view ''realistically;'' that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent — war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.
Susan Sontag – [War]
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag – [Fantasy]
What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Susan Sontag – [Beauty]
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being — while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up. Normally we don't experience, at least don't want to experience, our sexual fulfillment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfillment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not.
Susan Sontag – [Pornography]
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
Susan Sontag – [Pornography]
With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease — because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
Susan Sontag – [Disease]
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