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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.

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
Shoot
Pictures
Afraid
Take
Nostalgic

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Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
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Ideas disturb the levelness of life
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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
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Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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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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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute
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The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
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Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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