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

— Susan Sontag

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that.

— Susan Sontag

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

— Susan Sontag

If one could amputate part of one's consciousness...

— Susan Sontag

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

— Susan Sontag

I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

— Susan Sontag

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 there's always an erotic aspect to some extent.

— Susan Sontag

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

— Susan Sontag

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

— Susan Sontag

I’m now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzsche an elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. Furthermore, I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of ‘real’ aggressively. I’m sending out Colin pieces ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world.

— Susan Sontag