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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.

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
Either
Taken
Given
Away
Body
Great
Succeed
Writing
Deal
Going
Deals

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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How boring just to be a body.
Susan Sontag
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Susan Sontag
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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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That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.
Susan Sontag
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Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.
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 question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.
Susan Sontag
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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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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
Susan Sontag
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
Susan Sontag
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Can I love someone...and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
Susan Sontag
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
Susan Sontag
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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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His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.
Susan Sontag
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
Susan Sontag
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10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
Susan Sontag
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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
Susan Sontag
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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
Susan Sontag