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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
More quotes by Susan Sontag
I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact importing, I stopped doing it.
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I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.
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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
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Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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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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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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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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Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.
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The two ideas are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questioning subjectivity, the photographer is all.
Susan Sontag
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
Susan Sontag
Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
Susan Sontag
To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.
Susan Sontag
Now the new things happening in France don't interest me.
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The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.
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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 creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
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I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
Susan Sontag
