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To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

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
Hand
Worker
Artist
Eras
Hands
Production
Thing
Productions
Weird
Workers
Mass
Writer

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
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Most of my reading is rereading.
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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
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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?
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Art is a form of consciousness.
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We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
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Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.
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To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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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.
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
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the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
Susan Sontag
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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
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We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag