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

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Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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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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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
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That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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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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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.
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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
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In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: Oh, this is where it comes from! I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
Susan Sontag