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One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

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
Others
Criticizes
Another
Despises
Recognizes
Despise
Criticize
Oneself
Example
Artist
Revolted

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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
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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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Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
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The highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
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Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
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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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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
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This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
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The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.
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