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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.

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
Kissing
Inspiration
Clenched
Waiting
Shove
Society
Eagerness
Stuff
Forehead
Foreheads
Kiss
Curious

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.
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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.
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger danger is only a means to success.
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Art is a form of consciousness.
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
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Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
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Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
Susan Sontag
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
Susan Sontag
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...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Susan Sontag
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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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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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
Susan Sontag
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In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Susan Sontag