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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
Savage
Savages
Critic
Mediocre
Critics
Jobs
Important

More quotes by Susan Sontag

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Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
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You can always be quoted.
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A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.
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Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.
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Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.
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I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
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The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.
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The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
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Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
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Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.
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Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
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Taste has no system and no proofs.
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The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
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To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Susan Sontag
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To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have.
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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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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
Susan Sontag
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Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
Susan Sontag
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The only interesting ideas are heresies
Susan Sontag