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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

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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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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.
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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
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In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
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I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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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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As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
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It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
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Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger danger is only a means to success.
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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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The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Susan Sontag
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
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