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An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

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
Important
Savage
Savages
Critic
Mediocre
Critics
Jobs

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Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
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Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
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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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What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
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Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
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Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
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The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
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Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as a fantasy when it is not our own.
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Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
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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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Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger danger is only a means to success.
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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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Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.
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There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.
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I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.
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Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.
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It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
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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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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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