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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
Work
Simply
Rapidly
Alive
Keeping
Write
Throw
Doesn
Easily
Find
Elements
Firsts
Build
First
Usually
Rewriting
Writing
Worth
Draft
More quotes by Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
Susan Sontag
Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
Susan Sontag
Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.
Susan Sontag
Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
Susan Sontag
When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Susan Sontag
the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
Susan Sontag
Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
Susan Sontag
We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
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
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
Susan Sontag
Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
Susan Sontag
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
Susan Sontag
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
Susan Sontag
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
Susan Sontag
'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.
Susan Sontag
