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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

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
Frivolous
Serious
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The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
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The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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All photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable - that is, unforgettable.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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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.
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All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
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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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I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
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Desire has no history.
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Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
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I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
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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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A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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