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A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

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
Work
Propaganda
Intention
Personal
Whatever
Artist
Art
Cannot
Anything
Advocate

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My skull is crammed with quotations.
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I want to save my soul, that timid wind.
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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Shouting has never made me understand anything.
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I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.
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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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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
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What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.
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Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
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Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
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Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.
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Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.
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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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One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
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It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.
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What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
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