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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
Always
Writer
Love
Becoming
Almost
Reading
Write
Precedes
Makes
Fired
Dream
Impulse
Writing
Usually
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Art is seduction, not rape.
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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.
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Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
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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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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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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
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I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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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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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
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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).
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I don’t care about someone being intelligent any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.
Susan Sontag