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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.

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
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Fantasy
Painters
Pornographic
Perfection
Nazi
Depicted
Show
Imperfection
Physique
Often
Forbidden
Nazis
Sense
Technical
Nude
Shows
Magazines
Sculptors
Pinup
Look
Painter
Imperfections
Asexual
Looks
Pictures
Bodily
Nudes

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.
Susan Sontag
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Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.
Susan Sontag
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The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
Susan Sontag
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People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
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
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
Susan Sontag
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The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
Susan Sontag
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the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself.
Susan Sontag
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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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Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Susan Sontag
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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
Susan Sontag
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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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Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
Susan Sontag
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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
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We are ruled by quotations.
Susan Sontag