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I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

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
Writing
Response
Good
Direct
Love
Writer
Like
Courses
Course
Profoundly
Whether
Agony
Write
Uncertain
Enough
Passionate

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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
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I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
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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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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
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Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
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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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Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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My skull is crammed with quotations.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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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.
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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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