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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

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
Literature
Write
Writing
Audience

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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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).
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.
Susan Sontag
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Susan Sontag
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The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.
Susan Sontag
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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
Susan Sontag
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
Susan Sontag
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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
Susan Sontag
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Susan Sontag
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''
Susan Sontag
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
Susan Sontag
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We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
Susan Sontag
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Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
Susan Sontag
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I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.
Susan Sontag
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I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
Susan Sontag