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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

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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
Feelings
Anger
Energizing
Art
Emotion
Contemplative
Best
Goes
Dread
Writing
Least
Passive
Feeling
Admiration
Difficult
Mood
Fear
Emotions
Write
Basic

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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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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I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.
Susan Sontag
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The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
Susan Sontag
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
Susan Sontag
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The white race is the cancer of human history it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag
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Art is a form of consciousness.
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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In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
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
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One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.
Susan Sontag
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
Susan Sontag
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My skull is crammed with quotations.
Susan Sontag
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.
Susan Sontag
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
Susan Sontag
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
Susan Sontag