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A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

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
Soft
Considered
Disease
Demeaning
Dying
Deaths
Fiction
Shameful
Easy
Memorial
Death
Diseases
Part
Mythology

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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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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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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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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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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
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I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
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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.
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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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