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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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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
Cameras
Murder
Sublimation
Photograph
Subliminal
Someone
Frightened
Time
Soft
Appropriate
Camera
Gun

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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
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Art is seduction, not rape.
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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.
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
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AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
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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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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
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You can always be quoted.
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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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Ideas disturb the levelness of life
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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
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As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
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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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