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

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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
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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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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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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 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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Art is a form of consciousness.
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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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Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
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To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
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Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
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Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
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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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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
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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.
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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.
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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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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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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.
Susan Sontag