Quote

It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.

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
Decision
Nietzsche
Start
Beginnings
Sense
Lake
Hard
Dread
Great
Lakes
Writing
Begin
Always
Cold
Trepidation
Like
Says
Leaping

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In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
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In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
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writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
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Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
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It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.
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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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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 freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.
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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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With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.
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The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .
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Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.
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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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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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Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.
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Passion paralyzes good taste.
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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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With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
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