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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

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
Exercise
Literature
Ability
Weep
Train

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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
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A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
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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 He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
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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.
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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
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What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.
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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
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The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
Susan Sontag
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
Susan Sontag