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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

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
Dream
Impulse
Writing
Usually
Always
Writer
Love
Becoming
Almost
Reading
Write
Precedes
Makes
Fired

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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
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Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.
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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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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
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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.
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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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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
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The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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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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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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