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

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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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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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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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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.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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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.
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Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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