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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.

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
Consciousness
Pleasure
Moral
Art
Performs
Wells
Gratification
Well
Consists
Service
Intelligent

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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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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.
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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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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.
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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
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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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Paintings invariably sum up photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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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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Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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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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Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.
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The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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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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Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
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