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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

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
Truth
Anything
Writing
Something
Always
Would
Speaking
Told
Known

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Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.
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Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''
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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
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A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
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Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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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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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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