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What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.

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
Things
Complexes
Celebrate
Complex
Orchestrate
Writers
Incite
Expect
Articulate
View
Mourning
Writer
Ecstasy
Views
Compassionate

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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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Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
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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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Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.
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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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The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
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Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.
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Persons who merely have-a-life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing.
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We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?
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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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To photograph is to confer importance.
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Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
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Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.
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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.
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The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
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The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.
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Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
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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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The most refined form of sexual attractiveness - as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure - consists in going against the grain of one's sex.
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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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