Susan Sontag Quotes

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

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.