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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag
Age: 71 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Feminist
Film Critic
Film Director
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
New York City
New York
Susan Rosenblatt
Bored
Lead
Creativity
Creative
Avoiding
Purpose
Directed
Important
Purposes
Men
Boredom
Life
Controlled

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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
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The white race is the cancer of human history.
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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
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Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
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taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
Susan Sontag
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Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
Susan Sontag
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
Susan Sontag
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Susan Sontag