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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

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
Design
Art
Real
Make
Philistines
Nervous
Capacity

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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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We are ruled by quotations.
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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You can always be quoted.
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writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
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Most of my reading is rereading.
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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.
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What we need is to use what we have.
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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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