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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

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
Criticism
Sensual
Whose
Expense
Already
Capability
Upon
Classical
Energy
Expenses
Culture
Interpretation
Art
Revenge
Intellect
Dilemma

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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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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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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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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
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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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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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Desire has no history.
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
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Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
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Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
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