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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

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
Kind
Really
Life
Inclusive
Seemed
Writer
Wanted
Every

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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
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The white race is the cancer of human history.
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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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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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''
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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
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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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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
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Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
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'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
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I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
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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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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
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