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

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The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
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The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
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