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Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

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
Worth
Reading
Read
Bigs
Book
Something
Exalting
Deepening
Expect

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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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What we need is to use what we have.
Susan Sontag
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
Susan Sontag
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A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
Susan Sontag
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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
Susan Sontag
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
Susan Sontag
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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.
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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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
Susan Sontag
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Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.
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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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
Susan Sontag
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
Susan Sontag
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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
Susan Sontag
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
Susan Sontag