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Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

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
Enliven
Society
Illnesses
Used
Charges
Always
Metaphors
Corrupt
Unjust
Metaphor
Illness

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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
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You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.
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Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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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.
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
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Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
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Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.
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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.
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One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
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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.
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The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.
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God, living is enormous!
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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment and the quotation is one kind of fragment.
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Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
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When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.
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Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.
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