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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world

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
Enterprise
Give
Whole
Images
Anthology
Giving
Photograph
Grandiose
World
Finally
Photographic
Result
Collect
Hold
Photographs
Results
Heads
Sense

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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
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It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.
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Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
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One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
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Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
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Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
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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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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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What we need is to use what we have.
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the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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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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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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