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Taste has no system and no proofs.

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
System
Proofs
Proof
Taste

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
Susan Sontag
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
Susan Sontag
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Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
Susan Sontag
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You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
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The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Susan Sontag
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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
Susan Sontag
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Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
Susan Sontag
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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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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
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I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
Susan Sontag
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
Susan Sontag
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
Susan Sontag
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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