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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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
Feeds
Ambition
Others
Doe
Work
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
Susan Sontag
I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
Susan Sontag
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
Susan Sontag
An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
Susan Sontag
To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
Susan Sontag
The only interesting ideas are heresies
Susan Sontag
Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
Susan Sontag
It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
Susan Sontag
The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Susan Sontag
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Susan Sontag
What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
Susan Sontag
Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
Susan Sontag
I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
Susan Sontag
The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
Susan Sontag
Shouting has never made me understand anything.
Susan Sontag
the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
Susan Sontag
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
Susan Sontag
Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
Susan Sontag