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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

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The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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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.
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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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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
Susan Sontag
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The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
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The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
Susan Sontag
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
Susan Sontag
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
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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