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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

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
Anyone
Reality
Real
Images
Supposed

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
Susan Sontag
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
Susan Sontag
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Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
Susan Sontag
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
Susan Sontag
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
Susan Sontag
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All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.
Susan Sontag
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Susan Sontag
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The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
Susan Sontag
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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
Susan Sontag
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
Susan Sontag
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
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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 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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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
Susan Sontag
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
Susan Sontag
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
Susan Sontag
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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