Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was a US writer, novelist, critic, essayist, filmmaker, philosopher, and political activist. She is best known for incisive critical essays. Her best-known works include the critical works "Against Interpretation" (1966), "Styles of Radical Will" (1968), "On Photography" (1977), and "Illness as Metaphor" (1978), as well as the fictional works "The Way We Live Now" (1986), "The Volcano Lover" (1992), and "In America" (1999).Wisdom & Quotes
- Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
- Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny... it is also her vulnerability.
- Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
- A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
- Books are ... funny little portable pieces of thought.
- The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.
- Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
- The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.
- Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
- Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
- He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.
- What is most beautiful is virile men is something feminine;
- Notes on Camp, Against Interpretation
Leonard Lauder