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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

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
Threat
Fearful
Inconceivable
Large
Opposed
Destinies
Destiny
Equally
Twin
Art
Allows
Continual
Two
Arts
Cope
Specters
Live
Popular
Seemingly
Unremitting
Writing
Terror
Twins
Rations
People
Fantasy
Served
Banality

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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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We are ruled by quotations.
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What we need is to use what we have.
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
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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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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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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
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In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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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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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
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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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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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