Quote

Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

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
Self
Actor
Life
Consciousness
Edification
Results
Hoarding
Audience
Spectacle
Actors
Relations
Live
Instinct
Human
Relation
Humans
Result

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Art is a form of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
Susan Sontag
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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.
Susan Sontag
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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
Susan Sontag
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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
Susan Sontag
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Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
Susan Sontag
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
Susan Sontag
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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.''
Susan Sontag
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
Susan Sontag
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.
Susan Sontag
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
Susan Sontag
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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
Susan Sontag
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Susan Sontag