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Art is seduction, not rape.

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
Rape
Seduction
Art

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
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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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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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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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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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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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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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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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The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
Susan Sontag
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
Susan Sontag
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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
Susan Sontag
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I have been told that I am a natural feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
Susan Sontag
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
Susan Sontag