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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

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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
World
Knowledge
Photographed
Means
Appropriate
Certain
Photograph
Power
Putting
Feels
Relation
Mean
Oneself
Thing
Photography
Like
Therefore

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
Susan Sontag
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
Susan Sontag
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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
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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
Susan Sontag
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
Susan Sontag
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
Susan Sontag
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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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God, living is enormous!
Susan Sontag
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A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
Susan Sontag
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
Susan Sontag
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Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
Susan Sontag
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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
Susan Sontag
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Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.
Susan Sontag
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Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger danger is only a means to success.
Susan Sontag