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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
Art
Performs
Wells
Gratification
Well
Consists
Service
Intelligent
Consciousness
Pleasure
Moral
More quotes by Susan Sontag
Desire has no history.
Susan Sontag
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Susan Sontag
The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
Susan Sontag
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
Susan Sontag
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro... this is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
Susan Sontag
Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
Susan Sontag
The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Susan Sontag
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.
Susan Sontag
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
Susan Sontag
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
Susan Sontag
You can always be quoted.
Susan Sontag
The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.
Susan Sontag
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
Susan Sontag
When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
Susan Sontag
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
Susan Sontag
That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.
Susan Sontag
To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.
Susan Sontag
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.
Susan Sontag
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
Susan Sontag
Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
Susan Sontag
