Quote

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.

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
Firsts
Build
First
Usually
Rewriting
Writing
Worth
Draft
Work
Simply
Rapidly
Alive
Keeping
Write
Throw
Doesn
Easily
Find
Elements

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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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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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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.
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I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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How boring just to be a body.
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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
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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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Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.
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Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
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The white race is the cancer of human history.
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
Susan Sontag