Susan Sontag Quotes

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

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.