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The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
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
Crowds
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Fiction
History
Truth
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More quotes by Susan Sontag
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
Susan Sontag
I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
Susan Sontag
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Susan Sontag
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
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
It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
Susan Sontag
As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.
Susan Sontag
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
Susan Sontag
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past because we have survived.
Susan Sontag
Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.
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
The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
Susan Sontag
People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
Susan Sontag
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
Susan Sontag
Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.
Susan Sontag
Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
Susan Sontag
Ideas disturb the levelness of life
Susan Sontag
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
Susan Sontag
