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Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

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
Conditions
Start
Force
Comment
Making
Reflect
Artist
Artificial
Social
Touched
Art
Creates
Place
Condition

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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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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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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
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The really important thing is not to reject anything.
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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.
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It's hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
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Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.
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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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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.
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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
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Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
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