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Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger danger is only a means to success.

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
Writings
Ultimately
Concerned
Danger
Success
Means
Mean
Mailer
Writing
Norman

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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.
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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
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Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.
Susan Sontag
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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
Susan Sontag
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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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The only interesting ideas are heresies
Susan Sontag
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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
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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'.
Susan Sontag
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
Susan Sontag
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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
Susan Sontag
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When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
Susan Sontag
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All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
Susan Sontag
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The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
Susan Sontag