Susan Sontag (/ˈsɒntɑːɡ/; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer and filmmaker, literary icon, and political activist. Beginning with the publication of her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'" Sontag became a lifelong international cultural and intellectual celebrity. Sontag was often photographed and her image became widely recognized even in mainstream society. Her works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, The Way We Live Now, and Regarding the Pain of Others.
Read more about Susan Sontag: Life, Work, Activism, Controversies, Personal Life, Awards and Honors
Famous quotes by susan sontag:
“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“All ... forms of consensus about ‘great’ books and ‘perennial’ problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ‘what is already known.’ Those great books don’t only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)