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

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
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Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air.
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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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My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
Susan Sontag
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...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
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This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
Susan Sontag
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The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
Susan Sontag
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Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.
Susan Sontag
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No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
Susan Sontag
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Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.
Susan Sontag
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the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.
Susan Sontag
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Courage is morally neutral.
Susan Sontag
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Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures
Susan Sontag
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Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.
Susan Sontag
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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
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
Susan Sontag