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

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Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
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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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Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
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You can always be quoted.
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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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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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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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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
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To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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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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I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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