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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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A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
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Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.
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Many things in the world have not been named and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.
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As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
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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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Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote- evolved from within consciousness itself.
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Sanity is a cozy lie.
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We are ruled by quotations.
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Desire has no history.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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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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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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Everything has changed and nothing is changed.
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I'm more cautious about what I write.
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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.
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The white race is the cancer of human history.
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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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Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
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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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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
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