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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

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
Lying
Means
Self
Mean
Elementary
Defense

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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
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One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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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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