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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.

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
Roles
Call
Community
Hypocrisies
Faith
Hypocrisy
Account
Author
Accounts
Ancient

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What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
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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.
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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
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Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are
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Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
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I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.
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In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person I create myself.
Susan Sontag
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Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching.
Susan Sontag
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By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
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God, living is enormous!
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I love to read the way people love to watch television.
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Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
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Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love.
Susan Sontag
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
Susan Sontag
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Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.
Susan Sontag
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The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.
Susan Sontag
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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
Susan Sontag
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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.
Susan Sontag
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The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
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The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.
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