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I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.

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
People
Courage
Virtue
Timid
Imagine
Neutral
Moral
Morally
Wells
Wicked
Well
Brave
Believe
Consider
Good
Afraid

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To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.
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Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
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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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War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.
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I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
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The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to the serious. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
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When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.
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People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
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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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I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
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There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.
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