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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

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
Social
Pathology
Mainly
Aging
Older
Disease
Imagination
Growing
Ordeal
Moral
Ordeals

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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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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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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person I create myself.
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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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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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In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: Oh, this is where it comes from! I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
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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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All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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The happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''
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To photograph is to confer importance.
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Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
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