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I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

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
Book
Levels
People
Study
Either
Studied
Education
Prejudice
Books
Silly
Literature
University
Sure
Pride
Rather
Level

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
Susan Sontag
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art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.
Susan Sontag
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I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo­-Conservatives.
Susan Sontag
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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
Susan Sontag
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Writing is a mysterious activity.
Susan Sontag
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
Susan Sontag
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In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person I create myself.
Susan Sontag
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Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world
Susan Sontag
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
Susan Sontag
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
Susan Sontag
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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
Susan Sontag
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... one of art photography's most vigorous enterprises--[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate--but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
Susan Sontag
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And what do I mean by the word 'perfection'? That I shall not try to explain but only say, 'Perfection makes me laugh.' Not cynically, I hasten to add, 'With joy.
Susan Sontag
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In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.
Susan Sontag
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Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
Susan Sontag