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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

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
Interpretation
Revenge
Criticism
Intellectual
Upon
Art
Women
Critique
Memorable

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A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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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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writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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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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Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
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