Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Susan Sontag — American essayist, novelist, critic, and public intellectual (1933–2004). Explore her life, ideas, major works, famous quotes, and her enduring legacy in culture and thought.

Introduction

Susan Sontag stands as one of the most formidable voices of 20th-century American intellectual life. As an essayist, novelist, cultural critic, and public commentator, she challenged accepted norms of art, politics, media, illness, and representation. Her bold thinking and sharp prose made her at once revered and controversial. Today, her works continue to provoke, instruct, and inspire those who seek to understand how we see, interpret, and live in the modern world.

Early Life and Family

Susan Lee Rosenblatt was born January 16, 1933, in New York City.

Sontag’s childhood was marked by emotional distance and instability. She later described her mother as often absent and distant.

She skipped grades and advanced rapidly in schooling. She graduated from North Hollywood High School at age 15. This early acceleration foreshadowed her intellectual fluency and restlessness.

Youth and Education

From high school, Sontag entered the University of California, Berkeley, but soon transferred to the University of Chicago. A.B. at age 18 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

After Chicago, she pursued graduate work at Harvard University, initially in English literature, then pivoting toward philosophy and theology. Paris (Sorbonne) after Oxford also proved formative, giving her connections to expatriate intellectual circles and a lived relationship with European cultural milieus.

During her student years, Sontag’s personal life also began to shift. At age 17, she married Philip Rieff, a sociologist teaching at the University of Chicago. Their marriage lasted eight years, and they had one son, David Rieff. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.

Despite her academic promise, Sontag eventually withdrew from traditional university life to pursue writing full time.

Career and Achievements

Early Writing and Literary Emergence

Sontag’s earliest published work appeared while she was still a student. Her work first appeared in the Chicago Review. The Benefactor, in 1963. Death Kit, followed in 1967.

However, Sontag is best known for her essays. In 1964 she published “Notes on ‘Camp’,” a provocative and widely discussed piece that helped define “camp” as an aesthetic sensibility rather than mere kitsch. Against Interpretation (1966), established her voice as a critic seeking a more sensual rather than analytic reading of art.

Nonfiction, Critique, and Theoretical Work

Among her most influential works are:

• On Photography (1977): A collection of essays exploring how photography shapes perception, memory, reality, and the ethics of seeing.

• Illness as Metaphor (1978) & AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988): In these works she interrogates how disease becomes encrusted with symbolic meaning and stigma.

• Regarding the Pain of Others (2003): Her reflections late in life, especially on war, suffering, and how images mediate our encounter with atrocity.

Her essays appeared in major journals and magazines: The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, The Nation, Harper’s, The New York Times, among others.

She also ventured into fiction later in her career with more ambitious works: The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999). In America won the National Book Award in 2000. Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea.

Activism and Public Engagement

Beyond writing, Sontag was a high-profile public intellectual and activist. In the 1960s she opposed the Vietnam War and joined the Writers and ors War Tax Protest to refuse taxation as protest.

In 1989, she became President of PEN American Center and defended freedom of expression, notably rallying support for Salman Rushdie after the fatwa issued following The Satanic Verses.

During the Siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, Sontag traveled to the city and directed a candlelit production of Waiting for Godot. She became a symbolic figure for cultural resistance and was declared an honorary citizen.

Honors and Recognition

Sontag’s achievements were recognized across national and international arenas. Some of her awards include:

• MacArthur Fellowship (1990)

• National Book Award for In America (2000)

• Jerusalem Prize (2001)

• Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (2003)

• Prince of Asturias Award in Literature (2003)

• Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (France)

A curious and fitting posthumous tribute: in November 2024, a crater on Mercury was named after her.

Historical Milestones & Context

Sontag’s life and work traversed turbulent eras: Cold War cultural politics, the rise of mass media, the Vietnam War, the AIDS crisis, postmodern theory, and conflicts of the late 20th century. She engaged critically with the shifting boundary between image and reality during a time when photography and cinema were maturing as dominant languages of perception. Her work on illness and metaphor corresponded with social debates about disease, stigma, and medicalization.

Her activism in war zones and her engagement with media and violence placed her squarely in debates about ethics, representation, and responsibility. Her tenure as a public intellectual spanned a time when such voices had a visible influence in cultural and political discourse.

Legacy and Influence

Susan Sontag’s intellectual legacy is vast. She redefined how critics and broader publics talk about art, photography, illness, and representation. Her assertion that interpretation per se could be a limiting act pressed critics to reconsider form, experience, and sensual perception. Her writings on photography challenged the complacency of mediated seeing. Her work on illness deconstructed symbolic weight historically placed on disease.

As a female intellectual figure in a predominantly male-dominated landscape, she also became a cultural icon — often photographed, sometimes caricatured, but always central to debates about culture.

Her name continues to appear in literary criticism, media studies, philosophy, photography, visual culture, and political commentary.

Personality and Talents

Sontag’s persona combined boldness, intellectual ambition, elegance, and a restless quest. Her hair — often with a distinctive white streak — became part of her visual identity.

She was ambitious, willing to provoke, unafraid of backlash, and eager to inhabit many roles: novelist, essayist, critic, playwright, filmmaker, traveler, lecturer. She was not especially sympathetic to biographical reading; she resisted having her life reduce interpretation of her work.

Intimate relationships in her life were complex. She identified as bisexual and had relationships with multiple partners over her life, including Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, María Irene Fornés, and later Annie Leibovitz, with whom she shared a long-standing companionship.

Her temperament could be combative and exacting; she demanded rigor from both herself and interlocutors.

Famous Quotes of Susan Sontag

Here are some memorable quotes by Susan Sontag (translated or in original), reflecting her intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities:

1. “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

2. “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”

3. “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”

4. “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”

5. “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”

6. “Compassion is an unstable emotion. To yield to it is to submit to the suffering of others, to sense the anguish of others as one's own.”

7. “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.”

8. “My library was an anteroom to another world.”

These quotes capture her preoccupations with interpretation, vision, mortality, empathy, and creative integrity.

Lessons from Susan Sontag

From the life and work of Sontag, we might draw several lessons:

• Challenge received norms: Sontag’s questioning of interpretive conventions reminds us to question what we take for granted in art and criticism.

• Blend thinking with experience: She often moved into conflict zones to test ideas, refusing to remain purely abstract.

• Respect the image: Her work warns that visuals are not neutral—they shape memory, reality, and ethics.

• Deconstruct silence around suffering: In Illness as Metaphor, she urged a careful, honest language about disease rather than sentimental or symbolic language.

• Embrace multiplicity: Her life itself refused easy categorization—essayist, novelist, activist, public intellectual.

Her insistence on intellectual rigor, moral engagement, and artistic sensibility makes her a model for thinkers and creators today.

Conclusion

Susan Sontag remains a towering figure in American and global intellectual life. Her life (1933–2004) spanned multiple media, disciplines, and crises. She taught us how to see—and to think about what seeing means. Her essays, novels, activism, and public interventions continue to live in conversations about art, culture, violence, illness, and media. In reading her, one does not merely learn what she thought, but how she thought—and that may be her greatest gift.

To explore more, dive into Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, and her later Regarding the Pain of Others—and let her voice continue to challenge and provoke.