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Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
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
Insofar
Photographs
Shock
Photograph
Novel
Show
Shows
Something
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
Susan Sontag
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
Susan Sontag
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
Susan Sontag
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Susan Sontag
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
Susan Sontag
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Susan Sontag
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
Susan Sontag
The only interesting ideas are heresies
Susan Sontag
Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
Susan Sontag
The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
Susan Sontag
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
Susan Sontag
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
Susan Sontag
She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again - and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
Susan Sontag
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.
Susan Sontag
Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
Susan Sontag
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Susan Sontag
Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.
Susan Sontag
You can always be quoted.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
