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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
Audience
Literature
Write
Writing

More quotes by 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.
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When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan Sontag
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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Susan Sontag
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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.
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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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
Susan Sontag
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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.
Susan Sontag
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The fear of AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience of pure presentness (and a creation of the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one's peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social. It cannot be considered just a coupling it is a chain, a chain of transmission, from the past.
Susan Sontag
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag
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I certainly identify myself as a feminist.
Susan Sontag
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The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
Susan Sontag
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A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.
Susan Sontag
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Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
Susan Sontag
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I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.
Susan Sontag
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
Susan Sontag
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Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.
Susan Sontag