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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.

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
Usually
Ongoing
Painting
Paintings
Photographs
Pieces
Unlike
Photographic
History
Images
Biography
Others
Photograph
Invariably
Photography
Implies
Evidence
Biographies

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10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.
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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.
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Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
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writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
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Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.
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Art is seduction, not rape.
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If an irreducible distinction between theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this: Theatre is confined to a logical or continuous use of space. Cinemahas access to an alogical or discontinuous use of space.
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We are ruled by quotations.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
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Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
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To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
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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.
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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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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.
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