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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.
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
Doesn
Easily
Find
Elements
Firsts
Build
First
Usually
Rewriting
Writing
Worth
Draft
Work
Simply
Rapidly
Alive
Keeping
Write
Throw
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Susan Sontag
Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Susan Sontag
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
Susan Sontag
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
Susan Sontag
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Susan Sontag
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
Susan Sontag
All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
Susan Sontag
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag
Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
Susan Sontag
One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
Susan Sontag
Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
Susan Sontag
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
Susan Sontag
What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
Susan Sontag
The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.
Susan Sontag
the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
Susan Sontag
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
Susan Sontag
Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
Susan Sontag
