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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of 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
Film
Oldest
Disaster
Films
Subjects
Fiction
Science
Art

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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
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My skull is crammed with quotations.
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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
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Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.
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While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
Susan Sontag
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The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
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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.
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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Susan Sontag
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If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
Susan Sontag
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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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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
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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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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
Susan Sontag