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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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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
People
Stifle
Regulated
Appetite
Sensible
May
Must
Thinking
Life

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To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
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How boring just to be a body.
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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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The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.
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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.
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Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.
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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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His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.
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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.
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The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
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Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
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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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To camp is a mode of seduction... Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
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What we need is to use what we have.
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Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.
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Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.
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One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.
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