Susan Sontag Quotes - Page 3

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear endearing touching precious. At least the past is safe-though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!

To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged, to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

To the militant, identity is everything.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

Instead of just recording reality photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.