Susan Sontag Quotes

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

I identify with women more than men. I guess I have a strong feminine side.

I guess all of us have a little bit of both masculinity and femininity, and bridging the gap between those two things is really fertile.

When I was born, there was a very isolated idea of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and you belonged to one gender or the other.

I'm more androgynous, because men are supposed to be more spatial, women more literal - I'm a tomboy.

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.

I have always believed that we all have male and female within us.

When I was a little girl - well, like, a teenager - I wanted to be Sam Jackson. I always wanted to be men.

I've always wanted to be a man for a day.

Masculinity involves feminine qualities, and femininity involves masculine qualities.

We all have a cross-gender character: Every woman has a man that they can play, and every man has a woman that they can play.

Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman.

Men are not supposed to be mysterious. That's what you say about women. But I think men can have a little of it, too.

Being pretty... I'm just confused about it. I mean, I love getting my nails done, but I also like dressing like a boy. I think I feel most myself when I'm mixing femininity and masculinity. Like, fifty-fifty.

I was a tomboy as a kid - I was skinny and had cropped hair and was often mistaken for a boy - and up until I was about six, I had my own very fluid ideas of gender in that I believed that, somehow, an individual could choose whether or not s/he wanted to be a boy or a girl.

Hedi Slimane told me I was boyish in his eyes. For him femininity and masculinity are the same thing, the difference is not so interesting, he said.

In the face of patriarchy, it is a brave act indeed for both men and women to embrace, rather than shame or attempt to eradicate, the feminine.

Girls can wear jeans, cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, 'cause it's okay to be a boy, but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading.

I don't have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous, but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered.

Nothing is either all masculine or all feminine except having sex.

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

I was a tomboy right from the time I was a kid and loved to be like that. I'd hate all the girlie things. Well my best friends as a kid have been boys. I get along best with the opposite sex. I guess that's the case with most people though!

I'm not convinced that what are traditionally considered to be male energies or qualities or female energies or qualities really have as much to do with gender as many people think they do.

I believe gender is a spectrum, and I fall somewhere between Channing Tatum and Winnie the Pooh.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.