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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
Given
Away
Body
Great
Succeed
Writing
Deal
Going
Deals
Work
Either
Taken

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
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The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
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The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
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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.
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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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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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Susan Sontag
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I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
Susan Sontag
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
Susan Sontag
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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
Susan Sontag
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
Susan Sontag
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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.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
Susan Sontag