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There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

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
Camera
Cameras
Photography
Use
Every
Implicit
Aggression

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One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.
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Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous
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Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.
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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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War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
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Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
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Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
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Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
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Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''
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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.
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